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BEBEE 

OR 


Two Little Wooden Shoes. 




. .t- . 








BEBEE 


OR 


Two Little Wooden Shoes 


A STORY 


BY LOUISA DE LA RAME 

(“OUIDA”) 


Illustrated by Etheldred B. Barry 







BOSTON 

JOSEPH KNIGHT COMPANY 
1 896 



3 


Copyright, 1895 

BY 

Joseph Knight Company 


, J] 3U 
6 








PAGE. 


Bebee ........ Frontispiece. 

Headpiece to List of Illustrations .... v 

Tailpiece to List of Illustrations .... vii 

Headpiece to Chapter !•..... i 

“ Old Antoine took it to his wife” .... 3 

“ Bebee when it trotted no higher than the red carna- 
tion heads” ....... 4 

“ And there are a few cottages and cabins there near 

the pretty water ”....... 5 

“ ‘ But there is nobody that has the right ’ said Bebee ” 12 

“ My mother was a flower ” . . . . . 15 

Headpiece to Chapter H ...... 20 

“ She had to be active amidst them ” ... 22 

“The old man unlocked it M'ith a trembling hand ” . 26 

A bit of the Hotel de Ville 30 

“ The bright little cafes w'ere thronged with pleasure- 

seekers 31 

“ And all his spare time was taken up in digging his 

cabbage plot and seeing to his beehives ” . . 33 

“ Or a Gothic arch yawns beneath a wool warehouse ” 35 

Initial, “ The little cross woman with the pedler’s tray ” 39 

“ Her little muslin caj) blew back like the wings of a 

white butterfly ”....... 43 


V 


vi LIS T OF ILL US TRA TIONS, 

PAGE. 

St. Gudule’s • 44 

“ Bebee looked up with a smile” .... 56 

“ Sitting on the edge of her stall ” . . . . 59 

“ And Bebee would listen, the shell in her lap ” . . 72 

“ In the little dark attic there was a very old woman ” 74 

“ Old Annemie watched at the window ”... 80 

“ ‘ You are of the people of Rubes’ country, are you 

not ? ’ ” 87 . 

“ Against the dusky red sky, a young man with a pile 

of brushwood on his back ” . . . . . 96 

“ As she sat on the edge of the roof” . . . 102 

“ Then she went and kneeled down before the old 

shrine in the wall of the garden ” . . . . 108 

Jeannot ......... 120 

“ As she also hung out her linen ” . . . . 123 

“ His beautiful Murillo head was dark ” . . . 127 

“ In winter time drove a milk cart over the snow ” . 134 

More than once he came and filled in more fully his 
various designs in the little hut garden ” . . . 1^7 

All the people are gone on a pilgrimage ” . . 148 

It was a pretty picture — ” ..... 155 

•“ There was a sad darkling Calvary on the edge of 
the harvest- field that looked black against the blue 

sky ” . *. 165 

“ It was Gretchen, spinning, out in the open air ” . 170 

■“ He answered her dreamily, and lay there in the 

grass ” 174 

■“ Some one was playing a guitar ” . . . . 180 

Initial “ The shrine in the wall ” .... 186 

‘ You will come back ’ she moaned” . . . 197 

“In the lane by the swans’ water ” . . . . 202 

Tailpiece, “ The Varnhart children ” .... 203 

“ The poor to pick up the broken, bare boughs ” . 204 

“The keeper of the stall — chose good volumes for 
her ” . 


206 


LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. vii 

PAGE. 


And just the same was seen trudging to and fro ” . 212 

“And the Host was borne by on high ”... 218 

“ She sat under a shrine in a by street a moment ” . 230 

“ In the woods and fiekls al)out Alne she began to 

breathe again ” 234 

“The barges dropping down the sluggish streams ” . 239 

“ Paris in all its glory was about her ” . . . 243 

“ Jeannot, with Father Francis prayed before the 

shrine of the Seven Sorrows ” .... 252 

Tailpiece, “ Two little wooden shoes ” , . 255 


s 










y 


•i 





BEBEE, 

OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


CHAPTER L 

B EBEE sprang out of bed at daybreak. 
She was sixteen. 

It seemed a very wonderful thing to be as 
much as that — sixteen — a woman quite. 

A cock was crowing under her lattice. He 
said how old you are! — how old you are! 
every time that he sounded his clarion. 

She opened the lattice and wished him good 
day, with a laugh. It was so pleasant to be 
woke by him, and to think that no one in all 
the world could ever call one a child any 
more. 

There was a kid bleating in the shed. There 
was a thrush singing in the dusk of the syca- 
more leaves. There was a calf lowing to its 


b^bAe, 


mother away there beyond the fence. There 
were dreamy muffled bells ringing in the dis- 
tance from many steeples and belfries where 
the city was; they all said one thing, “How 
good it is to be so old as that — how good, 
how very good ! ” 

Bebee was very pretty. 

No one in all Brabant ever denied that. To 
.’ook at her it seemed as if she had so lived 
among the flowers that she had grown like 
them, and only looked a bigger blossom — that 
was all. 

She wore two little wooden shoes and a little 
cotton cap, and a gray kirtle — linen in summer, 
serge in winter; but the little feet in the shoes 
were like rose leaves, and the cap was as white 
as a lily, and the gray kirtle was like the bark 
of the bough that the apple-blossom parts, and 
peeps out of, to blush in the sun. 

The flowers had been the only godmothers 
that she had ever had, and fairy godmothers too. 

The marigolds and the sunflowers had given 
her their ripe, rich gold to tint her hair ; the 
lupins and irises had lent their azure to her 
eyes; the moss-rosebuds had made her pretty 
mouth ; the arum lilies had uncurled their soft- 
ness for her skin ; and the lime-blossoms had 
given her their frank, fresh, innocent fragrance. 

The winds had blown, and the rains had 
rained, and the sun had shone on her, indeed, 
and had warmed the whiteness of her limbs, 
but they had only given to her body and her 


OK TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 3 

soul a hardy, breeze-blown freshness like that 
of a field cowslip. 

She had never been called anything but 
Bebee. 

One summer day Antoine Maes — a French 
subject, but a Belgian by adoption and habit, 
an old man who got his meagre living by tilling 



the garden plot about his hut and selling 
flowers in the city squares — Antoine, going 
into Brussels for his day’s trade, had seen a 
gray bundle floating among the water-lilies in 
the bit of water near his hut and had hooked 
it out to land, and found a year-old child in it, 
left to drown, no doubt, but saved by the lilies, 
and laughing gleefully at fate. 

Some lace-worker, blind with the pain of toil, 
or some peasant woman harder of heart than 


4 


bAbAe, 


the oxen in her yoke, had left it there to drift 
away to death, not reckoning for the inward 
ripple of the current or the toughness of the 
lily leaves and sterns. 

Old Antoine took it to his wife, and the 
wife, a childless and aged soul, begged leave to 
keep it ; and the two poor lonely, simple folks 
grew to care for the homeless, motherless 
thing, and they and the people about all called 
it Bebee — only Bebee. 

The church got at it and added to it a saint’s 
name; but for all its little world it remained 
Bebee — Bebee when it trotted no higher than 

the red carnation 
heads ; — Bebee 
when its yellow 
curls touched as high as 
the lavender-bush; — 
Bebee on this proud day 
when the thrush’s song 
and the cock’s crow found 
her sixteen years old. 

Old Antoine’s hut 
stood in a little patch of 
garden ground with a brier hedge all round it, 
in that byway which lies between Laeken and 
Brussels, in the heart of flat, green Brabant, 
where there are beautiful meadows and tall, 
flowering hedges, and forest trees, and fern- 
filled ditches, and a little piece of water, deep 
and cool, where the swans sail all day long, and 
the silvery willows dip and sway with the wind. 



OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


5 


Turn aside from the highway, and there it 
lies to-day, and all the place brims over with 
grass, and boughs, and blossoms, and flowering 
beans, and wild dog-roses ; and there are a few 
cottages and cabins there near the pretty water, 
and farther there is an old church, sacred to St. 
Guido ; and beyond go the green level country 
and the endless wheat-fields, and the old mills 
with their red sails against the sun ; and beyond 



all these the pale blue, sea-like horizon of the 
plains of Flanders. 

It was a pretty little hut, pink all over like a 
sea-shell, in the fashion that the Netherlanders 
love ; and its two little square' lattices were dark 
with creeping plants and big rose-bushes, and 
its roof, so low that you could touch it, was 
golden and green with all the lichens and stone- 
worts that are known on earth. 

Here Bebee grew from year to year; and 
soon learned to be big enough and hardy 


6 


bAb&e, 


enough to tie up bunches of stocks and pinks 
for the market, and then to carry a basket for 
herself, trotting by Antoine’s side along the 
green roadway and into the white, wide streets ; 
and in the market the buyers — most often of 
all when they were young mothers — would 
seek out the little golden head and the beautiful 
frank blue eyes, and buy Bebee’s lilies and car- 
nations whether they wanted them or not. 
So that old Maes used to cross himself and 
say that, thanks to Our Lady, trade was thrice 
as stirring since the little one had stretched out 
her rosy fingers with the flowers. 

All the same, however stirring trade might 
be in summer, when the long winters came and 
the Montagne de la Cou^ was a sharp slope of 
ice, and the pinnacles of St. Gudule were all 
frosted white with snowj ^^nd the hot-house 
flowers alone could fill the market, and the 
country gardens were bitter black wind-swept 
desolations where the chilly roots huddled 
themselves together underground like homeless 
children in a cellar, — then the money gained 
in the time of leaf and blossom was all needed 
to buy a black loaf and fagot of wood ; and 
many a day in the little pink hut Bebee rolled 
herself up in her bed like a dormouse, to for- 
get in sleep that she was supperless and as cold 
as a frozen robin. 

So that when Antoine Maes grew sick and 
died, more from age and weakness than any 
real disease, there were only a few silver crowns 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


7 


in the brown jug hidden in the thatch; and the 
hut itself, with its patch of ground, was all that 
he could leave to Bebee. 

“ Live in it, little one, and take nobody in it 
to worry you, and be good to the bird and the 
goat, and be sure to keep the flowers blowing,” 
said the old man with his last breath ; and 
sobbing her heart out by his bedside, Bebee 
vowed to do his bidding. 

She was not quite fourteen then, and when 
she had laid her old friend to rest in the rough 
green graveyard about St. Guido, she was 
very sorrowful and lonely, poor little, bright 
Bebee, who had never hardly known a worse 
woe than to run the thorns of the roses into her 
fingers, or to cry because a thrush was found 
starved to death in the snow. 

Bebee went home, and sat down in a corner 
and thought. 

The hut was her own, and her own the little 
green triangle just then crowded with its May- 
day blossom in all the colors of the rainbow. 
She was to live in it, and never let the flowers 
die, so he had said ; good, rough old ugly 
Antoine Maes, who had been to her as father, 
mother, country, king, and law. 

The sun was shining. 

Through the little square of the lattice she 
could see the great tulips opening in the grass 
and a bough of the apple-tree swaying in the 
wind. A chaffinch clung to the bough, and 
swung to and fro singing. The door stood 


8 




Open, with the broad, bright day beaming 
through ; and Bebee’s little world came stream- 
ing in with it, — the world which dwelt in the 
half-dozen cottages that fringed this green lane 
of hers like beavers’ nests pushed out under 
the leaves on to the water’s edge. 

They came in, six or eight of them, all 
women ; trim, clean, plain Brabant peasants, 
hard-working, kindly of nature, and shrewd in 
their own simple matters ; people who labored 
in the fields all the day long, or worked them- 
selves blind over the lace pillows in the city. 

“You are too young^,to live alone, Bebee,” 
said the first of them. 3 “ My old mother shall 
come and keep house for you.” 

“Nay, better come / and live with me, 
Bebee,” said the second. “ I will give you bit 
and drop, and clothing, too, for the right to 
your plot of ground.” 

“ That is to cheat her,” said the third. 
“ Hark, here, Bebee : my sister, who is a lone 
woman, as you know well, shall come and bide 
with you, and ask you nothing — nothing at all 
— only you shall just give her a crust, perhaps, 
and a few flowers to sell sometimes.” 

“ No, no,” said the fourth ; “ that will not do. 
You let me have the garden and the hut, 
Bebee, and my sons shall till the place for you ; 
and I will live with you myself, and leave the 
boys the cabin, so you will have all the gain, 
do. you not see, dear little one? ” 

“ Pooh ! ” said the fifth, stouter and better 


OR TWO LITTLE WO ODE AT SHOES. 


9 


clothed than the rest. “You are all eager for 
your own good, not for hers. Now I — Father 
Francis says we should all do as we would be 
done by — I will take Bebee to live with me, 
all for nothing ; and we will root the flowers up 
and plant it with good cabbages and potatoes 
and salad plants. And I will stable my cows 
in the hut to sweeten it after a dead man, and I 
will take my chance of making money out of it, 
and no one can speak more fair than that when 
one sees what weather is, and thinks what 
insects do ; and all the year round, winter and 
summer, Bebee here will want for nothing, and 
have to take no care for herself whatever.” 

She who spoke. Mere Krebs, was the best-to- 
do woman in the little lane, having two cows of 
her own and ear-rings of solid silver, and a green 
cart, and a big dog that took the milk into 
Brussels. She was heard, therefore, with re- 
spect, and a short silence followed her words. 

But it was very short; and a hubbub of 
voices crossed each other after it as the 
speakers grew hotter against one another and 
more eager to convince each other of the disin- 
terestedness and delicacy of their offers of aid. 

Through it all Bebee sat quite quiet on the 
edge of the little truckle-bed, with her eyes 
fixed on the apple bough and the singing 
chaffinch. 

She heard them all patiently. 

They were all her good friends, friends old 
and true. This one had given her cherries for 


lO 


bAb^e, 


many a summer. That other had bought her 
a little waxen Jesus at the Kermesse. The old 
woman in the blue linen skirt had taken her to 
her first communion. She who wanted her 
sister to have the crust and the flowers, had 
brought her a beautiful painted book of hours 
that had cost a whole franc. Another had given 
her the solitary wonder, travel, and foreign feast 
of her whole life, — a day fifteen miles away at 
the fair at Mechlin. The last speaker of all had 
danced her on her knee a hundred times in baby- 
hood, and told her le^nds, and let her ride in 
the green cart behind^big curly-coated Tam- 
bour. 

Bebee did not doubt that these trusty old 
friends meant well by her, and yet a certain 
heavy sense fell on her that in all these counsels 
there was not the same whole-hearted and 
frank goodness that had prompted the gifts to 
her of the waxen Jesus, and the Kermesse of 
Mechlin. 

Bebee did not reason, because she was too 
little a thing and too tru.stful ; but she felt, in a 
vague, sorrowful fashion, that they were all of 
them trying to make some benefit out of her 
poor little heritage, with small regard for her- 
self at the root of their speculations. 

Bebee was a child, wholly a child ; body 
and soul were both as fresh in her as a golden 
crocus just born out of the snows. But she 
was not a little fool, though people sometimes 
called her so because she would sit in the mo- 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SILOES. 


I 


ments of her leisure with her blue eyes on the 
far-away clouds like a thing in a dream. 

She heard them patiently till the cackle of 
shrill voices had exhausted itself, and the six 
women stood on the sunny mud floor of the 
hut eyeing each other with venomous glances ; 
for though they were good neighbors at all 
times, each, in this matter, was hungry for the 
advantages to be got out of old Antoine’s plot 
of ground. They were very poor ; they toiled 
in the scorched or frozen fields all weathers, or 
spent from dawn to nightfall poring over their 
cobweb lace ; and to save a sou or gain a cab- 
bage was of moment to them only second to 
the keeping of their souls secure of heaven by 
Lenten mass and Easter psalm. 

Bebee listened to them all, and the tears 
dried on her cheeks, and her pretty rosebud 
lips curled close in one another. 

“ You are very good, no doubt, all of you,” 
she said at last. “ But I cannot tell . you that I 
am thankful, for my heart is like a stone, and I 
think it is not so very much for me as it is for 
the hut that you are speaking. Perhaps it is 
wrong in me to say so ; yes, I am wrong, I 
am sure, — you are all kind, and I am only 
Bebee. But you see he told me to live here 
and take care of the flowers, and I must do it, 
that is certain. I will ask Father Francis, if 
you wish ; but if he tells me I am wrong, as 
you do, I shall stay here all the same.” 

And in answer to their expostulations and 


12 


bj^bAe, 


condemnation, she only said the same thing 
over again always, in different words, but to the 
same steadfast purpose. The women clamored 
about her for an hour in reproach and rebuke ; 
she was a baby indeed, she was a little fool, she 
was a naughty, obstinate child, she was an un- 
grateful, wilful little creature, who ought to be 



beaten till she was blue, if only there was any- 
body that had the right to do it ! 

“ But there is nobody that has the right,” 
said Bebee, getting angry and standing upright 
on the floor, with Antoine’s old gray cat in her 
round arms. “ He told me to stay here, and 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


13 


he would not have said so if it had been wrong; 
and I am old enough to do for myself, and I 
am not afraid, and who is there that would hurt 
me? Oh, yes; go and tell Father Francis, if 
you like ! I do not believe he will blame me, 
but if he do, I must bear it. Even if he shut 
the church door on me, I will obey Antoine, 
and the flowers will know I am right, and they 
will let no evil spirits touch me, for the flowers 
are strong for that ; they talk to the angels in 
the night.” 

What use was it to argue with a little idiot 
like this? Indeed, peasants never do argue; 
they use abuse. 

It is their only form of logic. 

They used it to Bebee, rating her soundly, as 
became people who were old enough to be her 
grandmothers, and who knew that she had been 
raked out of their own pond, and had no more 
real place in creation than a water rat, as one 
might say. 

The women were kindly, and had never 
thrown this truth against her before, and in fact, 
to be a foundling was no sort of disgrace to 
their sight ; but anger is like wine, and makes 
the depths of the mind shine clear, and all the 
mud that is in the depths stink in the light ; 
and in their wrath at not sharing Antoine’s 
legacy, the good souls said bitter things that in 
calm moments they would no more have ut- 
tered than they would have taken up a knife to 
slit her throat. 


bAbAe, 




They talked themselves hoarse with impa- 
tience and chagrin, and went backwards over 
the threshold, their wooden shoes and their 
shrill voices keeping a clattering chorus. By 
this time it was evening ; the sun had gone off 
the floor, and the bird had done singing. 

Bebee stood in the same place, hardening 
her little heart, whilst big and bitter tears 
swelled into her eyes, and fell on the soft fur of 
the sleeping cat. 

She only very vaguely understood why it 
was in any sense shameful to have been raked 
out of the water-lilies (like a drowning field 
mouse, as they had said i^ was. 

She and Antoine hgid often talked of that 
summer morning when lie had found her there 
among the leaves, and Bebee and he had 
laughed over it gayly, and she had been quite 
proud in her innocent fashion that she had had 
a fairy and the flowers for her mother and god- 
mothers, which Antoine always told her was 
the case beyond any manner of doubt. Even 
Father Francis, hearing the pretty harmless 
fiction, had never deemed it his duty to disturb 
her pleasure in it, being a good, cheerful old man, 
who thought that woe and wisdom both come 
soon enough to bow young shoulders and 
to silver young curls without his interference. 

Bebee had always thought it quite a fine 
thing to have been born of water-lilies, with the 
sun for her father, and when people in Brussels 
had asked her of her parentage, seeing her 


OR TWO IJTTLE WOOD EX SHOES. 


15 


Stand in the market with a certain look on her 
that was not like other children, had always 
gravely answered in the purest good faith, 

“ My mother was a flower.” 

“You are a flower, at any rate,” they would 
say in return j and Bebee had been always 
quite content. 

But now she was doubtful ; she was rather 
perplexed than sorrowful. 

These good friends of hers seemed 
to see some new sin about her. Per- 
haps, after all, thought Bebee, it 
might have been better to have had 
a human mother who would have 
taken care of her now that old 
Antoine was dead, instead of those 
beautiful, gleaming, cold water-lilies 
which went to sleep on their green 
velvet beds, and did not certainly 
care when the thorns ran into her 
fingers, or the pebbles got in her wooden shoes. 

In some vague way, disgrace and envy — 
the twin Discords of the world — touched her 
innocent cheek with their hot breath, and as 
the evening fell, Bebee felt very lonely and a 
little wistful. 

She had been always used to run out in the 
pleasant twilight-time among the flowers and 
water them, Antoine filling the can from the 
well ; and the neighbors would come and lean 
against the little low wall, knitting and gossip- 
ing; and the big dogs, released from harness, 



i6 




would poke their heads through the wicket lor 
a crust; and the children would dance and 
play Colin Maillard on the green by the water ; 
and she, when the flowers were no longer 
thirsted, would join them, and romp and dance 
and sing the gayest of them all. 

But now the buckets hung at the bottom of 
the well, and the flowers hungered in vain, and 
the neighbors held aloof, and she shut to the 
hut door and listened to the rain which began 
to fall, and cried herself to sleep all alone in 
her tiny kingdom. 

When the dawn carri^ the sun rose red and 
warm ; the grass and b(^ughs sparkled ; a lark 
sang ; Bebee awoke sad in heart, indeed, for 
her lost old friend, but brighter and braver. 

“Each of them wants to get something out 
of me,” thought the child. “ Well, I will live 
alone, then, and do my duty, just as he said. 
The flowers will never let any real harm come, 
though they do look so indifferent and smiling 
sometimes, and though not one of them hung 
their heads when his coffin was carried through 
them yesterday.” 

That want of sympathy in the flower 
troubled her. 

The old man had loved them so well ; and 
they had all looked as glad as ever, and had 
laughed saucily in the sun, and not even a rose- 
bud turned the paler as the poor still stiffened 
limbs went by in the wooden shell. 

“ I suppose God cares ; but T wish they 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


7 


did,” said Bebee, to whom the garden was more 
intelligible than Providence. 

“ Why do you not care ? ” she asked the pinks, 
shaking the raindrops off their curled rosy petals. 

The pinks leaned lazily against their sticks, 
and seemed to say, “ Why should we care for 
anything, unless a slug be eating us ? — that is 
real woe, if you like.” 

Bebee, without her sabots on, wandered 
thoughtfully among the sweet wet sunlightened 
labyrinths of blossom, her pretty bare feet 
treading the narrow grassy paths with pleasure 
in their coolness. 

“ He was so good to you !” she said reproach- 
fully to the great gaudy gillyflowers and the 
painted sweet-peas. “ He never let you know 
heat or cold, he never let the worm gnaw or 
the snail harm you ; he would get up in the 
dark to see after your wants ; and when the 
ice froze over you, he was there to loosen your 
chains. Why c o you not care, any one of you ? ” 

“ How silly you are ! ” said the flowers. 
“You must be a butterfly or a poet, Bebee, to 
be as foolish as that. Some one will do all he 
did. We are of market value, you know. 
Care, indeed ! when the sun is so warm, and there 
is not an earwig in the place to trouble us.” 

The flowers were not always so selfish as 
this ; and perhaps the sorrow in Bebee’s heart 
made their callousness seem harder than it 
really was. 

When we suffer very much ourselves, any- 


i8 




thing that smiles in the sun seems cruel — a 
child, a bird, a dragon-fly — nay, even a flut- 
tering ribbon, or a spear-grass that waves in the 
wind. 

There was a little shrine at the corner of the 
garden, set into the wall ; a niche with a bit of 
glass and a picture of the Virgin, so battered 
that no one could trace any feature of it. 

It had been there for centuries, and was held 
in great veneration ; and old Antoine had al- 
ways cut the choicq^ buds of his roses and set 
them in a delf pot"in. front of it, every other 
morning all the sumn^er long. Bebee, whose 
religion was the sweetest, vaguest mingling of 
Pagan and Christian myths, and whose faith in 
fairies and in saints was exactly equal in 
strength and in ignorance, — Bebee filled the 
delf pot anew carefully, then knelt down on the 
turf in that little green corner, and prayed in 
devout hopeful childish good faith to the awful 
unknown Powers who were to her only as gentle 
guides and kindly playmates. 

Was she too familiar with the Holy Mother? 

She was almost fearful that she was ; but 
then the Holy Mother loved flowers so well, 
Bebee would not feel aloof from her, nor be 
afraid. 

“When one cuts the best blossoms for her, 
and tries to be good, and never tells a lie,” 
thought Bebee, “ I am quite sure, as she loves 
the lilies, that she will never altogether forget 
me.” 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


19 


So she said to the Mother of Christ fearlessly, 
and nothing doubting; and then rose for her 
daily work of cutting the flowers for the market 
in Brussels. 

By the time her baskets were full, her fowls 
fed, her goat foddered, her starling’s cage 
cleaned, her hut door locked, and her wooden 
shoes clattering on the sunny road into the city, 
Bebee was almost content again, though ever 
and again, as she trod the familiar ways, the 
tears dimmed her eyes as she remembered that 
old Antoine would never again hobble over the 
stones beside her. 

“You are a little wilful one, and too young 
to live alone,” said Father Francis, meeting her 
in the lane. 

But he did not scold her seriously, and she 
kept to her resolve ; and the women, who were 
good at heart, took her back into favor again ; 
and so Bebee had her own way, and the fairies, 
or the saints, or both together, took care of her ; 
and so it came to pass that all alone she heard 
the cock crow whilst it was dark, and woke to 
the grand and amazing truth that this warm, 
fragrant, dusky June morning found her full 
sixteen years old. 


20 


bAb&e, 


\ 



T he two years had not been all playtime 
any more than they had been all summer. 
When one has not father, or mother, or 
brother, and all one’s friends have barely bread 
enough for themselves, life cannot be very easy, 
nor its crusts very many at any time. 

Bebee had a cherub’s mouth, and a dreamer’s 
eyes, and a poet’s thoughts sometimes in her 
own untaught and unconscious fashion. 

But all the same she was a little hard-working 
Brabant peasant girl ; up whilst the birds twit- 
tered in the dark ; to bed when the red sun 
sank beyond the far blue line of the plains ; 
she hoed, and dug, and watered, and planted 
her little plot ; she kept her cabin as clean as a 
fresh-blossomed primrose ; she milked her goat 
and swept her floor ; she sat, all the warm days, 
in the town, selling her flowers, and in the 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


21 


winter time, when her garden yielded her 
nothing, she strained her sight over lace-mak- 
ing in the city to get the small bit of food that 
stood between her and that hunger which to the 
poor means death. 

A hard life ; very hard when hail and snow 
made the streets of Brussels like slopes of ice ; 
a little hard even in the gay summer time when 
she sat under the awning fronting the Maison du 
Roi ; but all the time the child throve on it, and 
was happy, and dreamed of many graceful and 
gracious things whilst she was weeding among 
her lilies, or tracing the threads to and fro on 
her lace pillow. 

Now — when she woke to the full sense of 
her wonderful sixteen years — Bebee, standing 
barefoot on the mud floor, was as pretty a sight 
as was to be seen betwixt Scheldt and Rhine. 

The sun had only left a soft warmth like an 
apricot’s on her white skin. Her limbs, though 
strong as a mountain pony’s, were slender and 
well shaped. Her hair curled in shiny crum- 
pled masses, and tumbled about her shoulders. 
Her pretty round plump little breast was white 
as the lilies in the grass without, and in this 
blooming time of her little life, Bebee, in her 
way, was beautiful as a peach-bloom is beauti- 
ful, and her innocent, courageous, happy eyes 
had dreams in them underneath their laughter, 
dreams that went farther than the green woods 
of Laeken, farther even than the white clouds 
of summer. 


22 




She could not move among them idly as 
poets and girls love to do ; she had to be active 
amidst them, else drought and rain, and worm 



and snail, and blight and frost, would have made 
havoc of their fairest hopes. 

The loveliest love is that which dreams high 
above all storms, unsoiled by all burdens ; but 
perhaps the strongest love is that which, whilst 
it adores, drags its feet through mire, and burns 
its brow in heat, for the thing beloved. 

So Bebee dreamed in her garden ; but all 
the time for sake of it hoed and dug, and hurt 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


23 


her hands, and tired her limbs, and bowed 
her shoulders under the great metal pails from 
the well. 

This wondrous morning, with the bright bur- 
den of her sixteen years upon her, she dressed 
herself quickly and fed her fowls, and, happy as 
a bird, went to sit on her little wooden stool in 
the doorway. 

There had been fresh rain in the night: the 
garden was radiant ; the smell of the wet earth 
was sweeter than all perfumes that are burned 
in palaces. 

The dripping rosebuds nodded against her 
hair as she went out; the starling called to her, 
“ Bebee, Bebee — bonjour, bonjour.” These 
were all the words it knew. It said the 
same words a thousand times a week. But 
to Bebee it seemed that the starling most 
certainly knew that she was sixteen years old 
that day. 

Breaking her bread into the milk, she satin 
the dawn and thought, without knowing that she 
thought it, “ How good it is to live when one 
is young ! ” 

Old people say the same thing often, but they 
sigh when they say it. Bebee smiled. 

Mere Krebs opened her door in the next cot- 
tage, and nodded over the wall. 

“ What a fine thing to be sixteen ! — a merry 
year, Bebee.” 

Marthe, the carpenter’s wife, came out from 
her gate, broom in hand. 


24 


bebAe, 


“ The Holy Saints keep you, Bebee ; why, 
you are quite a woman now ! ” 

The little children of Varnhart, the charcoal- 
burner, who were as poor as any mouse in the 
old churches, rushed out of their little home up 
the lane, bringing with them a cake stuck full 
of sugar and seeds, and tied round with a blue 
ribbon, that their mother had made that very 
week, all in her honor. 

“ Only see, Bebee ! Such a grand cake ! ” 
they shouted, dancing down the lane. “Jules 
picked the plums, and Jeanne washed the 
almonds, and Christine took the ribbon oT her 
own communion cap, all for you — all for you ; 
but you will let us come and eat it too? ” 

Old Gran’mere Bishot, who was the oldest 
woman about Laeken, hobbled through the 
grass on her crutches and nodded her white 
shaking head, and smiled at Bebee. 

“ I have nothing to give you, little one, ex- 
cept my blessing, if you care for that.” 

Bebee ran out, breaking from the children, 
and knelt down in the wet grass, and bent her 
pretty sunny head to the benediction. 

Trine, the miller’s wife, the richest woman of 
them all, called to the child from the steps of 
the mill, — 

“ A merry year, and the blessing of Heaven, 
Bebee ! Come up, and here is my first dish of 
cherries for you ; not tasted one myself; they 
will make you a feast with Varnhart’s cake, 
though she should have known better, so poor 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


25 


as she is. Charity begins at home, and these 
children’s stomachs are empty.” 

Bebee ran up and then down again gleefully, 
with her lapful of big black cherries; Tambour, 
the old white dog, who had used to drag her 
about in his milk cart, leaping on her in sym- 
pathy and congratulation. 

“ What a supper we will have ! ” she cried to 
the charcoal-burner’s children, who were turn- 
ing somersaults in the dock leaves, while the 
swans stared and hissed. 

When one is sixteen, cherries and a cake 
have a flavor of Paradise still, especially when 
they are tasted twice, or thrice at most, in all 
the year. 

An old man called to her as she went by his 
door. All these little cabins lie close together, 
with only their apple-trees, or their tall beans, 
or their hedges of thorn between them ; you 
may ride by and never notice them if you do 
not look for them under the leaves closely, as 
you would for thrushes’ nests. 

He, too, was very old ; a lifelong neighbor 
and gossip of Antoine’s ; he had been a day 
laborer in these same fields all his years, and 
had never travelled farther than where the red 
mill-sails turned among the colza and the corn. 

“ Come in, my pretty one, for a second,” he 
whispered, with an air of mystery that made 
Bebee’s heart quicken with expectancy. “Come 
in; I have something for you. They were my 
dead daughter’s — you have heard me talk of 


26 


bAbAe, 


her — Lisette, who died forty year or more ago, 
they say ; for me I think it was yesterday. 
Mere Krebs — she is a hard woman — heard 
me talking of my girl. She burst out laugh- 
ing, ‘ Lord’s sake, fool, why, your girl would be 
sixty now an she had lived.’ Well, so it may 
be ; you see, the new mill was put up the week 
she died, and you call the new mill old ; but, 
my girl, she k young to me. Always young. 
Come here, Bebee.” 

Bebee went aft^r him a little awed, into the 
dusky interior, that smelt 
of stored apples and of 
dried herbs that hung 
from the roof. There 
was a walnut-wood press, 
such as the peasants of 
France and the low 
countries keep their 
homespun linen in and 
their old lace that serves 
for the nuptials and bap- 
tisms of half a score of 
generations. 

The old man unlocked 
it with a trembling hand, 
and there came from it an odor of dead lavender 
and of withered rose leaves. 

On the shelves there were a girl’s set of 
clothes, and a girl’s sabots, and a girl’s com- 
munion veil and wreath. 

“ They are all hers,” he whispered, — “ all 



OR TWO LITTLE WOOD EAT SHOES. 


27 


hers. And sometimes in the evening time I 
see her coming along the lane for them — do 
you not know? There is nothing changed; 
nothing changed ; the grass, and the trees, and 
the huts, and the pond are all here ; why 
should she only be gone away? ” 

“Antoine is gone.” 

“Yes. But he was old; my girl is young.” 

He stood a moment, with the press door 
open, a perplexed trouble in his dim eyes; the 
divine faith of love and the mule-like stupidity 
of ignorance made him cling to this one thought 
without power of judgment in it. 

“They say she would be sixty,” he said, 
with a little dreary smile. “ But that is absurd, 
you know. Why, she had cheeks like yours, 
and she would run — no lapwing could fly 
faster over corn. These are her things, you 
see; yes — all of them. That is the sprig of 
sweetbrier she wore in her belt the day before 
the wagon knocked her down and killed her. 
I have never touched the things. But look 
here, Bebee, you are a good child and true, 
and like her just a little. I mean to give you 
her silver clasps. They were her great-grcat- 
great-grandmother’s before her. God knows 
how old they are not. And a girl should have 
some little wealth of that sort ; and for An- 
toine’s sake — ” 

The old man stayed behind, closing the 
press door upon the lavender-scented clothes, 
and sitting down in the dull shadow of the hut 


28 




to think of his daughter, dead forty summers 
and more. 

Bebee went out with the brave broad silver 
clasps about her waist, and the tears wet on 
her cheeks for a grief not her own. 

To be killed just when one was young, and 
was loved liked that, and all the world was in 
its May-day flower ! The silver felt cold to 
her touch — as cold as though it were the dead 
girl’s hands that held her. 

The garlands that the children strung of 
daisies and hung about her had never chilled 
her so. 

But little Jeanne, the youngest of the char- 
coal-burner’s little tribe, running to meet her, 
screamed with glee, and danced in the gay 
morning. 

“ Oh, Bebee ! how you glitter ! Did the 
Virgin send you that off her own altar? Let 
me see — let me touch ! Is it made of the 
stars or of the sun? ” 

And Bebee danced with the child, and the 
silver gleamed and sparkled, and all the people 
came running out to see, and the milk carts 
were half an hour later for town, and the hens 
cackled loud unfed, and the men even stopped 
on their way to the fields and paused, with their 
scythes on their shoulders, to stare at the 
splendid gift. 

“ There is not such another set of clasps in 
Brabant; old work you could make a fortune 
of in the curiosity shops in the Montagne,” 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


2g 


said Trine Krebs, going up the steps of her 
mill house. “ But, all the same, you know, 
Bebee, things off a dead body bring mischance 
sometimes.” 

But Bebee danced with the child, and did 
not hear. 

Whose f^te day had ever begun like this one 
of hers? 

She was a little poet at heart, and should not 
have cared for such vanities ; but when one is 
only sixteen, and has only a little rough woollen 
frock, and sits in the market place or the lace- 
room, with other girls around, how should one 
be altogether indifferent to a broad, embossed, 
beautiful shield of silver that sparkled with each 
step one took? 

A quarter of an hour idle thus was all, how- 
ever, that Bebee or her friends could spare at 
five o’clock on a summer morning, when the 
city was waiting for its eggs, its honey, its 
flowers, its cream, and its butter, and Tambour 
was shaking his leather harness in impatience 
to be off with his milk-cans. 

So Bebee, all holiday though it was, and 
heroine though she felt herself, ran indoors, 
put up her cakes and cherries, cut her two 
basketfuls out of the garden, locked her hut, 
and went on her quick and happy little feet 
along the grassy paths toward the city. 

The sorting and tying up of the flowers she 
always left until she was sitting under the awn- 
ing in front of the Broodhuis ; the same awning. 


30 r>ABAE, 

tawny as an autumn pear and weather-blown 
as an old sail, which had served to shelter 
Antoine Maes from heat and rain through all the 
years of his life. 

“ Go to the Madeleine ; you will make 
money there, with your pretty blue eyes, 
Bebee,” people had said to her of late : but 
Bebee had shaken her head. 

Where she had sat in her babyhood at An- 
toine’s feet, she would sit so long as she sold 
dowers in Brussels, — here, 
underneath the shadow of the 
Gothic towers that saw Egmont 
die. 

Old Antoine had never gone 
into the grand market that is 
fashioned after the Madeleine 
of Paris, and where in the cool, 
wet, sweet-smelling halls, all the 
flowers of Brabant are spread 
in bouquets fit for the bridal of 
Una, and large as the shield of 
the Red-Cross Knight. 

Antoine could not compete 
with all those treasures of green- 
house and stove. He had 
always had his little stall among 
those which spread their tawny awnings and 
their merry hardy blossoms undei the shadow 
of the H6tel de Ville, in the midst of the buy- 
ings and sellings, the games and the quarrels, 
the auctions and the Cheap Johns, the mounte- 



6>A’ TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


31 


bank and the marriage parties, that daily and 
hourly throng the Grande Place. 

Here Bebee, from three years old, had been 
used to sit beside him. By nature she was as 
gay as a lark. The people always heard her 
singing as they passed the garden. The chil- 
dren never found their games so merry as when 
she danced their rounds with them ; and 
though she dreamed so much out there in the 
air among the carnations and the roses, or in 
the long, low workroom in the town, high 
against the crocheted pinnacles of the cathedral, 
yet her dreams, if vaguely wistful, were all 
bright of hue and sunny in their fantasies. 
Still, Bebee had one sad unsatisfied desire: 
she wanted to know so much, and she knew 
nothing. 

She did not care for 
the grand gay people. 

When the band 
played, and the 
park filled, and the 
bright little cafes 
were thronged with 
pleasure seekers, 
and the crowds 
flocked hither and 
thither to the 
woods, to the theatres, to the galleries, to the 
guinguettes, Bebee, going gravely along with 
her emptied baskets homeward, envied none 
of these. 



32 




When at Noel the little children hugged iheir 
loads of puppets and sugar-plums ; when at 
the F^te Dieu the whole people flocked out be- 
ribboned and vari-colored like any bed of 
spring anemones ; when in the merry mid- 
summer the chars-a-bancs trundled away into 
the forest with: laughing loads of students and 
maidens ; when irf the rough winters the car- 
riages left furred and jewelled women at the 
doors of the operas or the palaces, — Bebee, 
going and coming through the city to her 
flower stall or lace work, looked at them all, 
and never thought of envy or desire. 

She had her little hut: she could get her 
bread ; she lived with the flowers ; the neighbors 
were good to her, and now and then, on a 
saint’s day, she too got her day in the woods ; 
it never occurred to her that her lot could be 
better. 

But sometimes sitting, looking at the dark 
old beauty of the Broodhuis, or at the won- 
drous carven fronts of other Spanish houses, or 
at the painted stories of the cathedral windows, 
or at the quaint colors of the shipping on the 
quay, or at the long dark aisles of trees that 
went away through the forest, where her steps 
had never wandered, — sometimes Bebee would 
get pondering on all this unknown world that 
lay before and behind and around her, and a 
sense of her own utter ignorance would steal 
on her; and she would say to herself, “ If only 
I knew a little — just a very little ! ” 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


33 


But it is not easy to know even a very little 
when you have to work for your bread from 
sunrise to nightfall, and when none of your 
friends know how to read or write, and even 
your old priest is one of a family of peasants, 
and can just teach you the alphabet, and that 
is all. For Father Francis could do no more 
than this ; and all his spare time was taken up 



in digging his cabbage plot and seeing to his 
beehives ; and the only books that Bebee ever 
beheld were a few tattered lives of saints that 
lay moth-eaten on a shelf of his cottage. 

But Brussels has stones that are sermons, or 
rather that are quaint, touching, illuminated 
legends of the Middle Ages, which those who 
run may read. 


34 


b&bAe, 


Brussels is a gay little city, that lies as bright 
within its girdle of woodland as any butterfly 
that rests upon moss. 

The city has its ways and wiles of Paris. It 
decks itself with white and gold. It has music 
under its trees and soldiers in its streets, and 
troops marching and countermarching along its 
sunny avenues. It has blue and pink, and 
yellow and green, on its awnings and on its 
house fronts. It has a merry open-air life on 
its pavements at little marble tables before 
little gay-colored cafes. It has gilded bal- 
conies, and tossing flags, and comic operas, and 
leisurely pleasure seekers, and tries always to 
believe and make the world believe that it is 
Paris in very truth. 

But this is only the Brussels of the noblesse 
and the foreigners. 

There is a Brussels that is better than this — 
a Brussels that belongs to the old burgher life, 
to the artists and the craftsmen, to the master- 
masons of the Moyen-age, to the same spirit 
and soul that once filled the free men of Ghent 
and the citizens of Bruges and the besieged of 
Leyden, and the blood of Egmont and of 
Horn. 

Down there by the water-side, where the old 
quaint walls lean over the yellow sluggish stream, 
and the green barrels of the Antwerp barges 
swing against the dusky piles of the crumbling 
bridges. 

In the gray square desolate courts of the 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


35 


old palaces, where in cobweDoed galleries and 
silent chambers the Flemish tapestries drop to 
pieces. 

In the great populous square, where, above 
the clamorous and rushing crowds, the majestic 
front of the Maison du Roi frowns against the 
sun, and the spires- and pinnacles of the bur- 
gomaster’s gathering-halls tower into the sky 
in all the fantastic luxuriance of Gothic fancy. 

Under the vast shadowy wings of angels in 
the stillness of the cathedral, across whose 
sunny aisles some little child goes slowly all 
alone, laden with lilies for the Feast of the 
Assumption, till their white glory hides its 
curly head. 

In all strange quaint old-world 
niches withdrawn from men in 
silent grass-grown corners, 
where a twelfth-century cor- 
bel holds a pot of roses, or a 
Gothic arch yawns beneath 
a wool warehouse, or a water- 
spout with a grinning faun’s 
head laughs in the grim 
humor of the Moyen-%e 
above the bent head of a young lace-worker. 

In all these, Brussels, though more worldly 
than her sisters of Ghent and Bruges, and far 
more worldly yet than her Teuton cousins of 
Freiburg and Niirnberg, is still in her own way 
like as a monkish story mixed up with the 
Romaunt of the Rose ; or rather like some gay 



bAdj^e, 


3 "^ 


French vaudeville, all fashion and jest, illus- 
trated in old Missal manner with helm and 
hauberk, cope and cowl, praying knights and 
fighting priests, winged griffins and nimbused 
saints, flame-breathing dragons and enamoured 
princes, all mingled together in the illuminated 
colors and the heroical grot^que romance of 
the Middle Ages. 

And it was this side pf the city that Bebee 
knew ; and she loved it well, and would not 
leave it for the market of the Madeleine. 

She had no one to tell her anything, and all 
Antoine had ever been able to say to her con- 
cerning the Broodhuis was that it had been 
there in his father’s time; and regarding St. 
Gudule, that his mother had burned many a 
candle before its altars for a dead brother who 
ha^d been drowned off the dunes. 

But the child’s mind, unled, but not mis- 
led, had pondered on these things, and her 
heart had grown to love them ; and perhaps 
no student of Spanish architecture, no anti- 
quary of Moyen-age relics, loved St. Gudule 
and the Broodhuis as little ignorant Bebee 
did. 

There had been a time when great dark, 
fierce men had builded these things, and made 
the place beautiful. So much she knew ; and the 
little wistful, untaught brain tried to project 
itself into those unknown times, and failed, and 
yet found pleasure in the effort. And Bebee 
would say to herself as she walked the streets. 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


37 


“ Perhaps some one will come some day who 
will tell me all those things.” 

Meanwhile, there were the flowers, and she 
was quite content. 

Besides, she knew ail the people : the old 
cobbler, who sat next her, and chattered all 
day long like a magpie ; the tinker, who had 
come up many a summer night to drink a glass 
with Antoine; the Cheap John, who cheated 
everybody else, but who had always given her 
a toy or a trinket ,at every F6te Dieu all the 
summers she had known ; the little old woman, 
sour as a crab, who sold rosaries and pictures 
of saints, and little waxen Christs upon a tray ; 
the big dogs who pulled the carts in, and lay 
panting all day under the rush-bottomed chairs 
on which the egg-wives and the fruit sellers sat, 
and knitted, and chaffered ; nay, even the gor- 
geous huissier and the frowning gendarme, who 
marshalled the folks into order as they went up 
for municipal registries, or for town misde- 
meanors, — she knew them all; had known 
them all ever since she had first trotted in like 
a little dog at Antoine’s heels. 

So Bebee stayed there. 

It is, perhaps, the most beautiful square in 
all Northern Europe, with its black timbers, and 
gilded carvings, and blazoned windows, and 
majestic scutcheons, and fantastic pinnacles. 
That Bebee did not know, but she loved it, and 
she sat resolutely in front of the Broodhuis, 
selling her flowers, smiling, chatting, helping 


38 


bj^bAe, 


the old woman, counting her little gains, eating 
her bit of bread at noonday like any other 
market girl, but at times glancing up to the 
stately towers and the blue sky, with a look on 
her face that made the old tinker and cobbler 
whisper together, “What does she see there? 
— the dead people or the angels?” 

The truth was that even Bebee herself did 
not know very surely what she saw — some- 
thing that was still nearer to her than even this 
kindly crowd that loved her. That was all she 
could have said had anybody asked her. 

But none did. 

No one wanted to hear what the dead said ; 
and for the angels, the tinker and the cobbler 
were of opinion that one had only too much 
of them sculptured about everywhere, and 
shining on all the casements — in reverence be 
it spoken, of course. 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


39 


CHAPTER III. 



REMEMBERED it was your name- 
day, child Here are half a dozen 
eggs,” said one of the hen wives ; 
tSl and the little cross’ woman with the 
pedler’s tray added a waxen St. 
Agnes, colored red and yellow to 
the very life no doubt ; and the old 
Cheap John had saved her a cage 
for the starling ; and the tinker had 
a cream cheese for her in a vine-leaf, 
and the sweetmeat seller brought her 
a beautiful gilded horn of sugar- 
plums, and the cobbler had made her 
actually a pair of shoes — red shoes, beautiful 
shoes to go to mass in and be a wonder in 
to all the neighborhood. And they thronged 
round her, and adored the silver waist buckles ; 
and when Bebee got fairly to her stall, and 
traffic began, she thought once more that 
nobody’s feast day had ever dawned like hers. 

When the chimes began to ring all over the 
city, she could hardly believe that the carillon 
was not saying its “ Laus Deo ” with some 
special meaning in its bells of her. 


40 


bAb&e, 


The morning went by as usual ; the noise of 
the throngs about her like a driving of angry 
winds, but no more hurting her than the angels 
on the roof of St. Gudule are hurt by. the 
storm when it breaks. 

Hard words, fierce passions, low thoughts, 
evil deeds, passed by the child without resting 
on her; her heart was in her flowers, and was 
like one of them with the dew of daybreak 
on it. 

There were many strangers in the city, and 
such are always sure to loiter in the Spanish 
square ; and she sold fast and well her lilacs 
and her roses, and her knots of thyme and 
sweetbrier. 

She was always a little sorry to see them go, 
her kindly pretty playmates that, nine times 
out of ten no doubt, only drooped and died in 
the hands that purchased them, as human souls 
soil and shrivel in the grasp of the passions that 
woo them. 

The day was a busy one, and brought in good 
profit. Bebee had no less than fifty sous in her 
leather pouch when it was over, — a sum of 
magnitude in the green lane by Laeken. 

A few of her moss-roses were still unsold, 
that was all, when the Ave Maria began ringing 
over the town and the people dispersed to their 
homes or their pleasuring. 

It was a warm gray evening: the streets were 
full ; there were blossoms in all the balconies, 
and gay colors in all the dresses. The old 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


41 


tinker put his tools together, and whispered to 
her, — 

“ Bebee, as it is your feast day, come and 
stroll in St. Hubert’s gallery, and I will buy 
you a little gilt heart, or a sugar-apple stick, or 
a ribbon, and we can see the puppet show 
afterwards, eh ? ” 

But the children were waiting at home : she 
would not spend the evening in the city ; she 
only thought she would just kneel a moment in 
the cathedral and say a little prayer or two for 
a minute — the saints were so good in giving 
her so many friends. 

There is something very touching in the 
Flemish peasant’s relation with his Deity. It 
is all very vague to him : a jumble of veneration 
and familiarity, of sanctity and profanity, with- 
out any thought of being familiar, or any idea 
of being profane. 

There is a homely poetry, an innocent affec- 
tionateness in it, characteristic of the people. 
He talks to his good angel Michael, and to his 
friend that dear little Jesus, much as he would 
talk to the shoemaker over the way, or the 
cooper’s child in the doorway. 

It is a very unreasonable, foolish, clumsy sort 
of religion, this theology in wooden shoes ; it is 
half grotesque, half pathetic ; the grandmothers 
pass it on to the grandchildren as they pass the 
bowl of potatoes round the stove in the long 
winter nights ; it is as silly as possible, but it 
comforts them as they carry fagots over the 


42 


b£b£e, 


frozen canals or wear their eyes blind over the 
squares of lace ; and it has in it the supreme 
pathos of any perfect confidence, of any utterly 
childlike and undoubting trust. 

This had been taught to Bebee, and she went 
to sleep every night in the firm belief that the 
sixteen little angels of the Flemish prayer kept 
watch and ward over her bed. For the rest, 
being poetical, as these north folks are noT 
and having in her — wherever it came from, 
poor little soul — a warmth of fancy and a 
spirituality of vision not at all northern, she 
had mixed up her religion with the fairies of 
Antoine’s stories, and the demons in which the 
Flemish folks are profqund believers, and the 
flowers into which she put all manner of sentient 
life, until her religion was a fantastic medley, 
so entangled that poor Father Francis had 
given up in despair any attempt to arrange it 
more correctly. Indeed, being of the peasantry 
himself, he was not so very full sure in his own 
mind that demons were not bodily presences, 
quite as real and often much more tangible than 
saints. Anyway, he let her alone ; and she 
believed in the goodness of God as she believed 
in the shining of the sun. 

People looked after her as she went through 
the twisting, picture-like streets, where sunlight 
fell still between the peaked high roofs, and 
lamps were here and there lit in the bric-a-brac 
shops and the fruit stalls. 

Her little muslin cap blew back like the wings 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


43 


of a white butterfly. Her sunny hair caught 
the last sun-rays. Her feet were fair in the 
brown wooden shoes. Under the short woollen 
skirts the grace of her pretty limbs moved 
freely. Her broad silver 
clasps shone like a shield, 
and she was utterly uncon- 
scious that any one looked ; 
she was simply and 
gravely intent on reaching 
St. Gudule to say her one 
prayer and not keep the 
children waiting. 

Some one leaning idly 
over a balcony in the 
street that is named after 
Mary of Burgundy saw her 
going thus. He left the 
balcony and went down his 
stairs and followed her. 

The sun-dazzle on the 
silver had first caught his 
sight ; and then he had 
looked downward at the 
pretty feet. 

These are the chances women call Fate. 

Bebee entered the cathedral. It was quite 
empty. Far away at the west end there was an 
old custodian asleep on a bench, and a woman 
kneeling. That was all. 

Bebee made her salutations to the high altar, 
and stole on into the chapel of the Saint 



44 

Sacrament ; it was that one that she loved 
best. 

She -said her prayer and thanked the saints 
for- all their gifts and goodness, her clasped 
hand against her silver shield, her basket on 



the pavement by her, abovehead the sunset 
rays streaming purple and crimson and golden 
through the painted windows that are the won- 
der of the world. 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


45 


When her prayer was done she still kneeled 
there ; her head thrown back to watch the 
light, her hands clasped still, and on her 
upturned face the look that made the people 
say, “ What does she see? — the angels or the 
dead?” 

She f forgot everything. She forgot the 
cherries at home, and the children even. She 
was looking upward at the stories of the painted 
panes ; she was listening to the message of the 
dying sun-rays ; she was feeling vaguely, wist- 
fully, unutterably the tender beauty of the sacred 
place and' the awful wonder of the world in 
which she with her sixteen years was all alone, 
like a little blue corn-flower among the wheat 
that goes for grist and the barley that makes 
men drunk. 

For she was alone, though she had so many 
friends. Quite alone sometimes ; for God had 
been cruel to her, and had made her a lark 
without song. 

When the sun faded and the beautiful case- 
ments lost all glow and meaning, Bebee rose 
with a startled look — had she been dreaming? 
— was it night? — would the children be sorry, 
and go supperless to bed? 

“Have you a rosebud left to sell to me?” a 
man’s voice said not far off; it was low and 
sweet, as became the Sacrament Chapel. 

Bebee looked up ; she did not quite know 
what she saw : only dark eyes smiling into 
hers. 


46 


bAbAe, 


By the instinct of habit she sought in her 
basket and found three moss-roses. She held 
them out to him. 

I do not sell flowers here, but I will give 
them to you,” she said, in her pretty grave 
^ childish fashion. 

“ I often want flowers.” said the stranger, as 
he took the buds. “Where do you sell yours? 
— in the market? ” 

“ In the Grande Place.” 

“ Will you tell me your name, pretty one?” 

“ I am Bebee.” 

There were people coming into the church. 
The bells were booming abovehead for vespers. 
There was a shuffle of chairs and a stir of feet. 
Boys in white went to and fro, lighting the 
candles. Great clouds of shadow drifted up 
into the roof and hid the angels. 

She nodded her little head to him. 

“Good night; I cannot stay. I have a cake 
at home to-night, and the children are wait- 
ing.” 

“ Ah ! that is important, no doubt, indeed. 
Will you buy some more cakes for the children 
from me? ” 

He slid a gold piece in her hand She 
looked at it in amaze. In the green lanes by 
Laeken no one ever saw gold. Then she gave 
it him back. 

“ I will not take money in church, nor any- 
where, except what the flowers are worth. 
Good night.” 


OR TIVO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


47 


He followed her, and held back the heavy 
oak door for her, and went out into the air with 
her. 

It was dark already, but in the square there 
was still the cool bright primrose-colored even- 
ing light. 

Bebee’s wooden shoes went pattering down 
the sloping and uneven stones. Her little gray 
figure ran quickly through the deep shade cast 
from the towers and walls. Her dreams had 
drifted away. She was thinking of the children 
and the cake. 

“You are in such a hurry because of the 
cake? ” said her new customer, as he followed 
her. 

Bebee looked back at him with a smile in 
her blue eyes. 

“Yes, they will be waiting, you know, and 
there are cherries too.” 

“ It is a grand day with you, then? ” 

“ It is my fete day: I am sixteen.” 

She was proud of this. She told it to the 
very dogs in the street. 

“Ah, you feel old, I dare say?” 

“ Oh, quite old ! They cannot call me a 
child any more.” 

“ Of course not, it would be ridiculous. Are 
those presents in your basket?” 

“ Yes, every one of them.” She paused a 
moment to lift the dead vine-leaves, and show 
him the beautiful shining red shoes. “ Look ! 
old Gringoire gave me these. I shall wear 


48 


b^bAe, 


them at mass next Sunday. I never had a 
pair of shoes in my life.” 

“ "Rut how will you wear shoes without stock- 



It was a snake cast into her Eden. 

She had never thought of it. 

“ Perhaps I can save money arid buy some,” 
she answered after a sad little pause. “ But 
that I could not do till next year. They would 
cost several francs, I suppose.” 

“ Unless a good fairy gives them to you?” 

Bebee smiled ; fairies were real things to her 
— relations indeed. She did not imagine that 
he spoke in jest. 

“ Sometimes I pray very much and things 
come,” she said softly. “ When the Gloire de 
Dijon was cut back too soon one summer, and 
never blossomed, and we all thought it was 
dead, I prayed all day long for it, and never 
thought of anything else ; and by autumn it was 
all in new leaf, and now its flowers are finer than 
ever.” 

“ But you watered it whilst you prayed, I 
suppose? ” 

The sarcasm escaped her. 

She was wondering to herself whether it 
would be vain and wicked to pray for a pair of 
stockings : she thought she would go and ask 
Father Francis. 

By this time they were in the Rue Royale, 
and half-way down it. The lamps were lighted. 
A regiment was marching up it with a band 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


49 


playing. The windows were open, and people 
were laughing and singing in some of them. 
The light caught the white and gilded fronts 
of the houses. The pleasure-seeking crowds 
loitered along in the warmth of the evening. 

Bebee, suddenly roused from her thoughts 
by the loud challenge of the military music, 
looked round on the stranger, and motioned 
him back. 

“Sir, — I do not know you, — why should 
you come with me? Do not do it, please. 
You make me talk, and that makes me late.” 

And she pushed her basket farther on her 
arm, and nodded to him and ran off — as fleetly 
as a hare through fern — among the press of 
the people. 

“ To-morrow, little one,” he answered her 
with a careless smile, and let her go unpursued. 
Above, from the open casement of a cafe, some 
young men and some painted women leaned 
out, and threw sweetmeats at him, as in carni- 
val time. 

“A new model, — that pretty peasant?” 
they asked him. 

He laughed in answer, and went up the steps 
to join them ; he dropped the moss-roses as he 
went, and trod on them, and did not wait. 


50 


bAb^:e, 



CHAPTER IV. 


B EBEE ran home as fast as her feet would 
take her. 

The children were all gathered about her 
gate in the dusky dewy evening ; they met her 
with shouts of welcome and reproach inter- 
mingled ; they had been watching for her since 
first the sun had grown low and red, and now 
the moon was risen. 

But they forgave her when they saw the 
splendor of her presents, and she showered out 
among them Pere Melchior’s horn of comfits. 

They dashed into the hut ; they dragged the 
one little table out among the flowers ; the 
cherries and cake were spread on it ; and the 
miller’s wife had given a big jug of milk, and 
Father Francis himself had sent some honey- 
comb. 

The early roses were full of scent in the dew ; 
the great gillyflowers breathed out fragrance in 
the dusk ; the goat came and nibbled the sweet- 
brier unrebuked ; the children repeated the 
Flemish bread-grace, with clasped hands and 
reverent eyes, “ Oh, dear little Jesus, come 
and sup with us, and bring your beautiful 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


SI 

Mother, too ; we will not forget you are God/’ 
Then, that said, they ate, and drank, and 
laughed, and picked cherries from each other’s 
mouths like little blackbirds; the big white 
dog gnawed a crust at their feet; old Krebs 
who had a fiddle, and could play it, came out 
and trilled them rude and ready Flemish tunes, 
such as Teniers or Mieris might have jumped 
to before an alehouse at the Kermesse ; Bebee 
and the children joined hands, and danced 
round together in the broad white moonlight, 
on the grass by the water-side ; the idlers came 
and sat about,, the women netting or spinning, 
and the men smoking a pipe before bedtime ; 
the rough hearty Flemish bubbled like a brook 
in gossip, or rung like a horn over a jest; 
Bebee and the children, tired of their play, 
grew quiet, and chanted together the “ Ave 
Maria Stella Virginis”; a nightingale among 
the willows sang to the sleeping swans. 

All was happy, quiet, homely; lovely also 
in its simple way. 

They went early to their beds, as people 
must do who rise at dawn. 

Bebee leaned out a moment from her own 
little casement ere she too went to rest. 

Through an open lattice there sounded the 
murmur of some little child’s prayer; the wind 
sighed among the willows ; the nightingales 
sang on in the dark — all was still. 

Hard work awaited her on the morrow, and 
on all the other days of the year. 


52 


B&B&E, 


She was only a little peasant, — she must 
sweep, and spin, and dig, and delve, to ^et 
daily her bit of black bread, — but that night 
she was as happy as a little princess in a fairy 
tale ; happy in her playmates, in her flowers, 
in her sixteen years, in her red shoes, in her 
silver buckles, because she was half a woman ; 
happy in the dewy leaves, in the singing birds, 
in the hush of the night, in the sense of rest, in 
the fragrance of flowers, in the drifting changes 
of moon and cloud ; happy because she was 
half a woman, because she was half a poet, be- 
cause she was wholly- a poet. 

“ Oh, dear swans, how good it is to be six- 
teen ! — how good it is to live at all ! — do you 
not tell the willows so?” said Bebee to the 
gleam of silver under the dark leaves by the 
water’s side, which showed her where her 
friends were sleeping, with their snowy wings 
closed over their stately heads, and the veiled 
gold and ruby of their eyes.- 

The swans did not awake to answer. 

Only the nightingale answered from the 
willows, with Desdemona’s song. 

But Bebee had never heard of Desdemona, 
and the willows had no sigh for her. 

“ Good night ! ” she said, softly, to all the 
green dewy sleeping world, and then she lay 
down and slept herself. — The nightingale sang 
on, and the willows trembled. 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


53 


CHAPTER V. 

TF I could save a centime a day, I could 

JL buy a pair of stockings this time next 
year,” thought Bebee, locking her shoes with 
her other treasures in her drawer the next morn- 
ing, and taking her broom and pail to wash 
down her little palace. 

But a centime a day is a great deal in Bra- 
bant, when one has not always enough for bare 
bread, and when, in the long chill winter, one 
must weave thread lace all through the short 
daylight for next to nothing at all ; for there 
are so many women in Brabant, and every one 
of them, young or old, can make lace, and if 
one do not like the pitiful wage, one may leave 
it and go and die, for what the master lace- 
makers care or know; there will always be 
enough, many more than enough, to twist the 
thread round the bobbins, and weave the bridal 
veils, and the trains for the courts. 

“ And besides, if I can save a centime, the 
Varnhart children ought to have it,” thought 
Bebee, as she swept the dust together. It was 
so selfish of her to be dreaming about a pair of 
stockings, when those little things often went 
for days on a stew of nettles. 


I 



54 BEDAe, 

So she looked at her own pretty feet, — 
pretty and slender, and arched, rosy, and fair, 
and uncramped by the pressure of leather, — 
and resigned her day-dream with a brave heart, 
as she put up her broom and went out to weed, 
and hoe, and trim, and prune the garden that 
had been for once neglected the night before. 

“ One could not move half so easily in stock- 
ings,” she thought with true philosophy as she 
worked among the black, fresh, sweet-smelling 
mould, and kissed a rose now and then as she 
passed one. 

When she got into the city that day, her 
rush-bottomed chair, which was always left up- 
side down in case rain should fall in the night, 
was set ready for her, and on itsseatwas a gay, 
gilded box, such as rich people give away full 
of bonbons. 

Bebee stood and looked from the box to the 
Broodhuis, from the Broodhuis to the box ; she 
glanced around, but no one had come there so 
early as she, except the tinker, who was busy 
quarrelling with his wife and letting his smelting 
fire burn a hole in his breeches. 

“ The box was certainly for her, since it was 
set upon her chair? ” — Bebee pondered a mo- 
ment; then little by little opened the lid. 

Within, on a nest of rose-satin, were two pair 
of silk stockings ! — real silk ! — with the pret- 
tiest clocks worked up their sides in color ! 

Bebee gave a little scream, and stood still, 
the blood hot in her cheeks ; no one heard her, 


OR TIVO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


55 


the tinker’s wife, who alone was near, having 
just wished Heaven to send a judgment on her 
husband, was busy putting out his smoking 
smallclothes. It is a way that women and wives 
have, and they never see the bathos of it. 

The place filled gradually. 

The customary crowds gathered. The busi- 
ness of the day began underneath the multitu- 
dinous tones of the chiming bells. Bebee’s 
business began too ; she put the box behind 
her with a beating heart, and tied up her 
flowers. 

It was the fairies, of course ! but they had 
never set a rush-bottomed chair on- its legs be- 
fore, and this action of theirs frightened her. 

It was rather an empty morning. She sold 
little, and there was the more time to think. 

About an hour after noon a voice addressed 
her, — 

“ Have you more moss-roses for me? ” 

Bebee looked up with a smile, and found 
some. It was her companion of the cathedral. 
She had thought much of the red shoes and 
the silver clasps, but she had thought nothing 
at all of him. 

“ You are not too proud to be paid to-day? ” 
he said, giving her a silver franc ; he would 
not alarm her with any more gold ; she thanked 
him, and slipped it in her little leathern pouch, 
and went on sorting some clove-pinks. 

“ You do not seem to remember me?” he 
said, with a little sadness. 


56 


b£bAe, 


“ Oh, I remember you,” said Bebee, lifting 
her frank eyes. “But you know I speak to so 
many people, and they are all nothing to me.” 

“ Who is anything to you ? ” It was softly 
and insidiously spoken, but it awoke no echo. 

“ Varnhart’s children,” she answered him, in- 
stantly. “ And old Annemie by the wharfside 



— and Tambour — and Antoine’s grave — and 
the starling — and, of course, above all, the 
flowers.” 

“ And the fairies, I suppose? — though they 
do nothing for you.” 

She looked at him eagerly, — 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


57 


“ They have done something to-day. I have 
found a box, and some stockings — such beauti- 
ful stockings ! Silk ones ! Is it not very odd ? ” 

“ It is more odd they should have forgotten 
you so long. May I see them? ” 

“ I cannot show them to you now. Those 
ladies are going to buy. But you can see them 
later — if you wait.” 

“ I will wait and paint the Broodhuis.” 

“ So many people do that; you are a painter 
then?” 

“ Yes — in a way.” 

He sat down on an edge of the stall, and 
spread his things there, and sketched, whilst 
the traffic went on around them. He was very 
many years older than she ; handsome, with a 
dark, and changeful, and listless face ; he wore 
brown velvet, and had a red ribbon at his 
throat; he looked a little as Egmont might 
have done when wooing Claire. 

Bebee, as she sold the flowers and took the 
change fifty times in the hour, glanced at him 
now and then, and watched the movements of 
his hands, she could not have told why. 

Always among men and women, always in 
the crowds of the streets, people were nothing 
to her ; she went through them as through a 
field of standing corn, — only in the field she 
would have tarried for poppies, and in the 
town she tarried for no one. 

She dealt with men as with women, simply, 
truthfully, frankly, with the innocent fearlessness 


58 


bAbAe, 


of a child. When they told her she was 
pretty, she smiled ; it was just as they said that 
her flowers were sweet. 

But this man’s hands moved so swiftly ; and 
as she saw her Broodhuis growing into color 
and form beneath them, she could not choose 
but look now and then, and twice she gave her 
change wrong. 

He spoke to her rarely, and sketched on and 
on in rapid bold strokes the quaint graces and 
massive richness of the Maison du Roi. 

There is no crowd so busy in Brabant that it 
will not find leisure to stare. The Fleming or 
the Walloon has nothing of the Frenchman’s 
courtesy ; he is rough and rude ; he remains a 
peasant even when town bred, and the surly in- 
solence of the “ Gueux” is in him still. He is 
kindly to his fellows, though not to beasts ; he 
is shrewd, patient, thrifty, industrious, and good 
in very many ways, but civil never. 

A good score of them left off their occupa- 
tions and clustered round the painter, staring, 
chattering, pushing, pointing, as though a brush 
had never been seen in all the land of Rubens. 

Bebee, ashamed of her people, got up from 
her chair and rebuked them. 

“ Oh, men of Brussels ; fie then for shame ! ” 
she called to them as clearly as a robin sings. 
“ Did never you see a drawing before? and are 
there not saints and martyrs enough to look at 
in the galleries? and have you never some 
better thing to do than to gape wide-mouthed 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODELL SILOES. 


59 


at a stranger? What laziness — ah! just 
worthy of a people who sleep and smoke while 
their dogs work for them I Go away, all of 
you ; look, there comes the gendarme — it will 
be the worse for you. Sir, sit under my stall; 
they will not dare trouble you then.” 

He moved under the awning, thanking her 
with a smile ; and the people, laughing, shuffled 
unwillingly aside and let him paint on in peace. 
It was only little Bebee, but they had spoilt the 
child from her infancy, and were used to obey her. 

The painter took a long time. He set about 
it with the bold ease of one used to all the in- 
tricacies of form and color, and he had the 
skill of a master. But he spent 
more than half the time looking 
idly at the humors of the popu- 
lace or watching how the 
treasures of Bebee’s garden 
went away one by one in 
the hands of strangers. 

Meanwhile, ever and 
again, sitting on the 
edge of her stall, with 
his colors and brushes 
tossed out on the board, 
he talked to her, and, 

with the soft imperceptible skill of long practice 
in those arts, he drew out the details of her 
little simple life. 

There were not always people to buy, and 
whilst she rested and sheltered the flowers from 



6o 


b^:bAe, 


the sun, she answered him willingly, and in one 
of her longer rests showed him the wonderful 
stockings. 

“ Do you think it be the fairies?” she 

asked him a little doubtfully. 

It was easy to make her believe any fantas- 
tical nonsense ; but her fairies were ethereal 
divinities. She could scarcely believe that they 
had laid that box on her chair. 

“ Impossible to doubt it ! ” he replied, un- 
hesitatingly. “ Given a belief in fairies at all, 
why should there be any limit to what they can 
do? It is the same with the saints, is it not?’" 

“Yes,” said Bebee, thoughtfully. 

The saints were mixed up in her imagination 
with the fairies in an intricacy that would 
have defied the best reasonings of Father 
Francis. 

“ Well, then, you will wear the stockings, 
will you not? Only, believe me, your feet are 
far prettier without them.” 

Bebee laughed happily, and took another 
peep in the cosy rose-satin nest. But her little 
face had a certain perplexity. Suddenly she 
turned on him. 

“ Did not foil put them there? ” 

“ I ? — never ! ” 

“ Are you quite sure? ” 

“Quite; but why ask?” 

“ Because,” said Bebee, shutting the box res- 
olutely and pushing it a little away, — “ because 
I would not take it if you did. You are a 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


6i 


stranger, and a present is a debt, so Antoine 
always said.” 

“Why take a present then from the Varnhart 
children, or your old friend who gave you the 
clasps? ” 

“ Ah, that is very different. When people 
are very, very poor, equally poor, the one with 
the other, little presents that they save for and 
make with such a difficulty are just things that 
are a pleasure ; sacrifices ; like your sitting up 
with a sick person at night, and then she sits up 
with you another year when you want it. Do 
you not know ? ” 

“ I know you talk very prettily. But why 
should you not take any one else’s present, 
though he may not be poor? ” 

“ Because I could not return it.” 

“ Could you not? ” 

The smile in his eyes dazzled her a little ; it 
was so strange, and yet had so much light 
in it; but she did not understand him one 
whit. 

“No; how could I?” she said earnestly. 
“ If I were to save for two years, I could not get 
francs enough to buy anything worth giving 
back ; and I should be so unhappy, thinking of 
the debt of it always. Do tell me if you put 
those- stockings there? ” 

“ No ” ; he looked at her, and the trivial lie 
faltered and died away ; the eyes, clear as crys- 
tal, questioned him so innocently. “Well, if I 
did ? ” he said, frankly ; “ you wished for them ; 


62 




what harm was there? Will you be so cruel as 
to refuse them from me? ” 

The tears sprang into Bebee’s eyes. She was 
sorry to lose the beautiful box, but more sorry 
he had lied to her. 

“ It was very kind and good,” she said, re- 
gretfully. “ But I cannot think why you should 
have done it, as you had never known me at 
all. And, indeed, I could not take them, be- 
cause Antoine would not let me if he were 
alive ; and if I gave you a flower every day all 
the year round I should not pay you the worth 
of them, it would be quite impossible; and 
why should you tell me falsehoods about such 
a thing? A falsehood is never a thing for a 
man.” 

She shut the box and pushed it towards him, 
and turned to the selling of her bouquets. Her 
voice shook a little as she tied up a bunch of 
mignonette and told the price of it. 

Those beautiful stockings ! why had she ever 
seen them, and why had he told her a lie? 

It made her heart heavy. For the first time 
in her brief life the Broodhuis seemed to frown 
between her and the sun. 

Undisturbed, he painted on and did not look 
at her. 

The day was nearly done. The peoplo be- 
gan to scatter. The shadows grew very long. 
He painted, not glancing once elsewhere than 
at his study. Bebee’s baskets were quite 
empty. 


OR TWO LITTLE IFOODE.V SHOES. 63 


She rose, and lingered, and regarded him 
wistfully : he was angered ; perhaps she had 
been rude? Her little heart failed her. 

If he would only look up ! 

But he did not look up ; he kept his hand- 
some dark face studiously over the canvas of 
the Broodhuis. She would have seen a smile 
in his eyes if he had lifted them ; but he never 
raised his lids. 

Bebee hesitated : take the stockings she 
would not; but perhaps she had refused them 
too roughly. She wished so that he would 
look up and saye her speaking first ; but he 
knew what he was about too warily and well to 
help her thus. 

She waited awhile, then took one little red 
moss-rosebud that she had saved all day in a 
corner of her basket, and held it out to him 
frankly, shyly, as a peace offering. 

“Was I rude? I did not mean to be. But 
I cannot take the stockings ; and why did you 
tell me that falsehood?” 

He took the rosebud and rose too, and smiled ; 
but he did not meet her eyes. 

“Let us forget the whole matter; it is not 
worth a sou. If you do not take the box, leave 
it; it is of no use to me.” 

“ I cannot take it.” 

She knew she was doing right. How was it 
that he could make her feel as though she were 
acting wrongly ? 


64 


b£b£e. 


“ Leave it then, I say. You are not the first 
woman, my dear, who has quarrelled with a wish 
fulfilled. It is a way your sex has of reward- 
ing gods and men. — Here, you old witch, 
here is a treasure-trove for you. You can sell 
it for ten francs in the town anywhere.” 

As he spoke he tossed the casket and the 
stockings in it to an old decrepit woman, who was 
passing by with a baker’s cart drawn by a dog; 
and, not staying to heed her astonishment, 
gathered his colors and easel together. 

The tears swam in Bebee’s eyes as she saw 
the box whirled through the air. 

She had done right ; she was sure she had 
done right. 

He was a stranger, and she could never have 
repaid him ; but he made her feel herself way- 
ward and ungrateful, and it was hard to see the 
beautiful fairy gift borne away forever by the 
chuckling, hobbling, greedy old baker’s woman. 
If he had only taken it himself, she would have 
been glad then to have been brave and to have 
done her duty. 

But it was not in his design that she should 
be glad. 

He saw her tears, but he seemed not to see 
them. 

“ Good night, Bebee,” he said carelessly, as 
he sauntered aside from her. “ Good night, 
my dear. To-morrow I will finish my paint- 
ing; but I will not offend you by any more 
gifts.” 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 65 

Bebee lifted her drooped head, and looked him 
in the eyes eagerly, with a certain sturdy resolve 
and timid wistfulness intermingled in her look. 

“ Sir, see, you speak to me quite wrongly,” 
she said with a quick accent, that had pride as 
well as pain in it. “ Say it was kind to bring 
me what I wished for ; yes, it was kind I know ; 
but you never saw me till last night, and I can- 
not tell even your name ; and it is very wrong 
to lie to any one, even to a little thing like me; 
and I am only Bebee, and cannot give you any- 
thing back, because I have only just enough to 
feed myself and the starling, and not always 
that in winter. I thank you very much for 
what you wished to do ; but if I had taken 
those things, I think you would have thought 
me very mean and full of greed ; and Antoine 
always said, ‘ Do not take what you cannot 
pay — not ever what you cannot pay — that 
is the way to walk with pure feet.’ Perhaps I 
spoke ill, because they spoil me, and they say 
I am too swift to say my mind. But I am not 
thankless — ^ not thankless, indeed — it is only 
I could not take what I cannot pay. That is 
all. You are angry still — not now — no? ” 

There was anxiety in the pleading. What 
did it matter to her what a stranger thought? 

And yet Bebee’s heart was heavy as he 
laughed a little coldly, and bade her good day, 
and left her alone to go out of the city home- 
wards. A sense of having done wrong weighed 
on her ; of having been rude and ungrateful. 


66 


bAbA/-, 


She had no heart for the children that even- 
ing. Mere Krebs was sitting out before her 
door shelling peas, and called to her to come 
in and have a drop of coffee. Krebs had come 
in from Vilvdorde fair, and brought a stock of 
rare good berries with him. But Bebec thanked 
her, and went on to her own garden to work. 

She had always liked to sit out on the quaint 
wooden steps of the mill and under the red 
shadov/ of the sails, watching the swallows 
flutter to and fro in the sunset, and hearing the 
droll frogs croak in the rushes, while the old 
people told her tales of the time of how in 
their babyhood they had run out, fearful yet 
fascinated, to see the beautiful Scots Grays 
flash by in the murky night, and the endless 
line of guns and caissons crawl black as a 
snake through the summer dust and the 
trampled corn, going out past the woods to 
Waterloo. 

But to-night she had no fancy for it: she 
wanted to be alone with the flowers. 

Though, to be sure, they had been very 
heartless when Antoine’s coffin had gone past 
them, still they had sympathy ; the daisies 
smiled at her with their golden eyes, and the 
roses dropped tears on her hand, just as her 
mood might be; the flowers were closer friends, 
after all, than any human souls ; and besides, 
she could say so much to them ! 

Flowers belong to fairyland ; the flowers 
and the birds and the butterflies are all that 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 67 

the world has kept of its Golden Age ; the 
only perfectly beautiful things on earth, joyous, 
innocent, half divine, useless, say they who are 
wiser than God. 

Bebee went home and worked among her 
flowers. 

A little laborious figure, with her petti- 
coats twisted high, and her feet wet with the night 
dews, and her back bowed to the hoeing and 
clipping and raking among the blossomingplants. 

“ How late you are working to-night, Be- 
bee ! ” one or two called out, as they passed 
the gate. She looked up and smiled ; but 
went on working. while the white moon rose. 

She did not know what ailed her. 

She went to bed without supper, leaving her 
bit of bread and bowl of goat’s milk to make 
a meal for the fowls in the morning. 

“Little ugly, shameful, naked feet!” she 
said to them, sitting on the edge of her mat- 
tress, and looking at them in the moonlight. 
They were very pretty feet, and would not have 
been half so pretty in silk hose and satin shoon ; 
but she did not know that : he had told her 
she wanted those vanities. 

She sat still a long while, her rosy feet sway- 
ing to and fro like, two roses that grow on one 
stalk and hang down in the wind. The little 
lattice was open; the sweet and dusky garden 
was beyond ; there was a hand’s breadth of sky, 
in which a single star was shining ; the leaves 
of the vine hid all the rest. 


68 


bAbAe, 


But for once she saw none of it. 

She only saw the black Broodhuis ; the red 
and gold sunset overhead ; the gray stones, 
with the fallen rose leaves and crushed fruits ; 
and in the shadows two dark, reproachful eyes, 
that looked at hers. 

Had she been ungrateful? 

The little tender, honest heart of her was 
troubled and oppressed. For once, that night 
she slept ill. 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


69 


CHAPTER VI. 

A ll the next day she sat under the yellow 
awning, but she sat alone. 

It was market day ; there were many 
strangers. Flowers were in demand. The 
copper pieces were ringing against one another 
all the hours through in her leathern bag. 
The cobbler was in such good humor that he 
forgot to quarrel with his wife. The fruit was 
in such plenty that they gave her a leaf-full of 
white and red currants for her noonday dinner. 
And the people split their sides at the Cheap 
John’s jokes; he was so droll. No one saw 
the leaks in his kettles or the hole in his bel- 
lows, or the leg that was lacking to his milking 
stool. 

Everybody was gay and merry that day. 
But Bebee’s eyes looked wistfully over the 
throng, and did not find what they sought. 
Somehow the day seemed dull, and the square 
empty. 

The stones and the timbers around seemed 
more than ever full of a thousand stories that 
they would not tell her because she knew 
nothing, and was only Bebee. 


70 


bAb&e, 


She had never known a dull hour before. 
She, a little bright, industrious, gay thing, 
whose hands were always full of work, and 
whose head was always full of fancies, even in 
the grimmest winter time, when she wove the 
lace in the gray, chilly workroom, with 
the frost on the casements, and the mice 
running out in their hunger over the bare brick 
floor. 

That bare room was a sad enough place 
sometimes, when the old women would bewail 
how they starved on the pittance they gained, 
and the young women sighed for their aching 
heads and their failing eyesight, and the chil- 
dren dropped great tears on the bobbins, be- 
cause they had come out without a crust to 
break their fast. 

She had been sad there often for others, but 
she had never been dull — not with this un- 
familiar, desolate, dreary dulness, that seemed 
to take all the mirth out of the, busy life around 
her, and all the color out of the blue sky above. 
Why, she had no idea herself. She wondered 
if she were going to be ill ; she had never been 
ill in her life, being strong as a little bird that 
has never known cage or captivity. ^ 

When the day was done, Bebee gave a quick 
sigh as she looked across the square. She had 
so wanted to tell him that she was not ungrate- 
ful ; and she had a little moss-rose ready, with 
a sprig of sweetbrier, and a tiny spray of 
maidenhair fern that grew under the willows, 


t 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES, 71 

which she had kept covered up with a leaf of 
sycamore all the day long. 

No one would have it now. 

The child went out of the place sadly as the 
carillon rang. There was only the moss-rose 
in her basket, and the red and white currants 
that had been given her for her dinner. 

She went along the twisting, many-colored, 
quaintly fashioned streets, till she came to the 
water-side. 

It is very ancient there still , there are all 
manner of old buildings, black and brown and 
gray, peaked roofs, gabled windows, arched 
doors, crumbling bridges, twisted galleries lean- 
ing to touch the dark surface of the canal, 
dusky wharves crowded with barrels, and bales, 
and cattle, and timber, and all the various 
freightage that the good ships come and go 
with all the year round, to and from the Zuyder- 
Zee, and the Baltic water, and the wild Nor- 
thumbrian shores, and the iron-bound Scottish 
lieadlands, and the pretty gray Norman sea- 
ports, and the white sandy dunes of Holland, 
with the toy towns and the straight poplar- 
trees. 

Bebee was fond of watching the brigs and 
barges, that looked so big to her, with their 
national flags flying, and their tall masts stand- 
ing thick as grass, and their tawny sails flapping 
in the wind, and about them the sweet, strong 
smell of that strange, unknown thing, the 
sea. 


72 


bAbAe, 


Sometimes the sailors would talk with her ; 
sometimes some old salt, sitting astride of a 
cask, would tell her a mariner’s tale of far-away- 
lands and mysteries of the deep ; sometimes 
some curly-headed cabin-boy would give her a 
shell or a plume of seaweed, and try and 
make her understand what the wonderful wild 



water was like, which was not quiet and slug- 
gish and dusky as this canal was, but was for- 
ever changing and moving, and curling and 
leaping, and making itself now blue as her 
eyes, now black as that thunder-cloud, now 
white as the snow that the winter wind tossed, 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


73 


now pearl hued and opaline as the convolvulus 
that blew in her own garden. 

And Bebee would listen, with the shell in 
her lap, and try to understand, and gaze at the 
ships and then at the sky beyond them, and 
try to figure to herself those strange countries 
to which these ships were always going, and 
saw in fancy all the blossoming orchard prov- 
ince of green France, and all the fir-clothed 
hills and rushing rivers of the snow-locked 
Swedish shore, and saw too, doubtless, many 
lands that had no place at all except in dream- 
land, and were more beautiful even than the 
beauty of the earth, as poets’ countries are, to 
their own sorrow, oftentimes. 

But this dull day Bebee did not go down 
upon the wharf; she did not want the sailors’ 
tales ; she saw the masts and the bits of bunt- 
ing that streamed from them, and they made 
her restless, which they had never done 
before. 

Instead she went in at a dark old door and 
climbed up a steep staircase that went up and 
up, as though she were mounting St. Gudule’s 
belfry towers ; and at the top of it entered a 
little chamber in the roof, where one square 
unglazed hole that served for light looked out 
upon the canal, with all its crowded craft, from 
the dainty schooner yacht, fresh as gilding and 
holystone could make her, that was running 
for pleasure to the Scheldt, to the rude, clumsy 
coal barge, black as night, that bore the rough 


74 





diamonds of Belgium to the snow-buried roofs 
of Christiania and Stromstad. 

In the little dark attic there was a very old 
woman in a red petticoat and a high cap, who 
sat against the window, and pricked out lace 
patterns with a pin on thick paper. 
She was eighty-five years old, and 
could hardly keep body and soul 
together. 

Bebee, running to her, kissed her. 
“ Oh, mother Annemie, look 
here ! Beautiful red and white 
currants, and a roll ; I saved 
them for you. They are the 
first currants we have seen this 
year. Me? oh, for me, I have 
eaten, more than are good ! 
You know I pick fruit like a sparrow, always. 
Dear mother Annemie, are you better? Are 
you quite sure you are better to-day? ” 

The little old withered woman, brown as a 
walnut and meagre as a rush, took the currants, 
and smiled with a childish glee, and began to 
eat them, bles^sing the child with each crumb 
she broke off the bread. 

“Why had you not a grandmother of your 
own, my little one?” she mumbled. “How 
good you would have been to her, Bebee ! ” 
“Yes,” said Bebee seriously, but her mind 
could not grasp the idea. It was easier for her 
to believe the fanciful lily parentage of An- 
toine’s stories. “ How much work have you 


OR TWO LITTLE WO ODE AT SHOES. 


75 


done, Annemie? Oh, all that? all that? But 
there is enough for a week. You work too 
early and too late, you dear Annemie.” 

“ Nay, Bebee, when one has to get one’s 
bread that cannot be. But I am afraid my 
eyes are failing. That rose now, is it well 
done? ” 

“ Beautifully done. Would the Baes take 
them if they were not? You know he is one 
that cuts every centime in four pieces.” 

“ Ah ! sharp enough, sharp enough, that 
is true. But I am always afraid of my eyes. 
I do not see the flags out there so well as I used 
to do.” 

“ Because the sun is so bright, Annemie ; 
that is all. I myself, when I have been sitting 
all day in the place in the light, the flowers 
look pale to me. And you know it is not age 
with me, Annemie?” 

The old woman and the young girl laughed 
together at that droll idea. 

“You have a merry heart, dear little one,” 
said old Annemie. “ The saints keep it to you 
always.” 

“ May I tidy the room a little? ” 

“ To be sure, dear, and thank you too. I 
have not much time, you see; and somehow 
my back aches badly when I stoop.” 

“And it is so damp here for you, over all 
that water ! ” said Bebee as she swept and 
dusted and set to rights the tiny place, and 
put in a little broken pot a few sprays of 


76 


b&bAe, 


honeysuckle and rosemary that she had brought 
with her. “ It is so damp here. You should 
have come and lived in my hut with me, Annemie, 
and sat out under the vine all day, and looked 
after the chickens for me when I was in the 
town. They are such mischievous little souls; 
as soon as my back is turned one or other is 
sure to push through the roof, and get out 
among the flower-beds. Will you never change 
your mind, and live with me, Annemie? I am 
sure you would be happy, and the starling says 
your name quite plain, and he is such a funny 
bird to talk to ; you never would tire of him. 
Will you never come? It is so bright there, 
and green and sweet smelling; and to think 
you never even have seen it ! — and the swans 
and all, — it is a shame.” 

“No, dear,” said old Annemie, eating her 
last bunch of currants. “You have said so so 
often, and you are good and' mean it, that I 
know. But I could not leave the water. 
It would kill me. Out of this window you 
know I saw my Jeannot’s brig go away — 
away — away — till the masts were lost in the 
mists. Going with iron to Norway ; the ‘Fleur 
d’Epine’ of this town, a good ship, and a sure, 
and her mate ; and as proud as might be, and 
with a little blest Mary in lead round his throat. 
She was to be back in port in eight months, 
bringing timber. Eight months — that brought 
Easter time. But she never came. Never, 
never, never, you know. I sat here watching 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


77 


them come and go, and my child sickened and 
died, and the summer passed, and the autumn, 
and all the while I looked — looked — looked ; 
for the brigs are all much alike ; and only 
her I always saw as soon as she hove in 
sight (because he tied a hank of flax to her 
mizzen-mast) ; and when he was home safe and 
sound I spun the hank into hose for him ; that 
was a fancy of his, and for eleven voyages, one 
on another, he had never missed to tie the flax 
nor I to spin the hose. But the hank of flax I 
never saw this time ; nor the brave brig ; nor 
my good man with his sunny blue eyes. Only 
one day in winter, when the great blocks of ice 
were smashing hither and thither, a coaster 
came in and brought tidings of how off in the 
Danish waters they had come on a water-logged 
brig, and had boarded her, and had found her 
empty, and her hull riven in two, and her crew 
all drowned and dead beyond any manner of 
doubt. And on her stern there was her name 
painted white, the ‘ Fleur d’Epine,’ of Brussels, 
as plain as name could be ; and that was all we 
ever knew: what evil had struck her, or how 
they had perished, nobody ever told. Only the 
coaster brought that bit of beam away, with the 
‘ Fleur d’Epine ’ writ clear upon it. But you 
see I never know my man is dead. Any day 
— who can say? — any one of those ships may 
bring him aboard of her, and he may leap out 
on the wharf there, and come running up the 
stairs as he used to do, and cry, in his merry 


78 


b£bAe, 


voice, ‘ Annemie, Annemie, here is more flax 
to spin, here is more hose to weave ! ’ For that 
was always his homeward word ; no matter 
whether he had had fair weather or foul, he 
always knotted the flax to his masthead. So 
you see, dear, I could not leave here. For 
what if he came and found me away? He 
would say it was an odd fashion of mourning for 
him. And I could not do without the window, 
you know. I can watch all the brigs come in ; 
and I can smell the shipping smell that I have 
loved all the days of my life ; and I can see the 
lads heaving, and climbing, and furling, and 
mending their bits of canvas, and hauling their 
flags up and down. And then who can say? — 
the sea never took him, I think — I think I 
shall hear his voice before I die. For they do 
say that God is good.” 

Bebee, sweeping very noiselessly, listened, and 
her eyes grew wistful and wondering. She had 
heard the story a thousand times ; always in 
different words, but always the same little tale, 
and she knew how old Annemie was deaf to all 
the1)ells that tolled the time, and blind to all 
the whiteness of her hair and all the wrinkles of 
her face, and only thought of her sea-slain 
lover as he had been in the days of her youth. 

But this afternoon the familiar history had a 
new patheticalness for her, and as the old soul 
put aside with her palsied hand the square of 
canvas that screened the casement, and looked 
out, with her old dim sad eyes strained in the 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODE.V SHOES. 


79 


longing that God never answered, Bebee felt a 
strange chill at her own heart, and wondered 
to herself, — 

“ What can it be to care for another creature 
like that? It must be so terrible, and yet it 
must be beautiful too. Does every one suffer 
like that?” 

She did not speak at all as she finished 
sweeping the bricks, and went down-stairs for a 
metal cruche full of water, and set over .a little 
charcoal on the stove the old woman’s brass 
soup kettle with her supper of stewing cabbage. 

Annemie did not hear or notice ; she was 
still looking out of the hole in the wall on to 
the masts, and the sails, and the water. 

It was twilight. 

From the barges and brigs there came the 
smell of the sea. The sailors were shouting to 
each other. The craft were crowded close, and 
lost in the growing darkness. On the other side 
of the canal the belfries were ringing for vespers. 

“ Eleven voyages one and another, and he 
never forgot to tie the flax to the mast,” An- 
nemie murmured, with her old wrinkled face 
leaning out into the gray air. “ It used to 
fly there, — one could see it coming up half a 
mile off, — just a pale yellow flake on the wind, 
like a tress of my hair, he would say. No, no, 
I could not go away; he may come to-night, 
to-morrow, any time ; he is not drowned, not 
my man ; he was all I had, and God is good, 
they say.” 


b&bAe, 


, 8o 


Bebee listened and looked ; then kissed the old 
shaking hand and took up the lace patterns and 
went softly out of the room without speaking. 



When old Annemie watched at the window 
it was useless to seek for any word or sign of 
her ; people said that she had never been quite 


01^ TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


8i 


right in her brain since that fatal winter noon 
sixty years before, when the coaster had 
brought into port the broken beam of the good 
brig “ Fleur d’Epine.” 

Bebee did not know about that, nor heed 
whether her wits were right or not. 

She had known the old creature in the lace- 
room where Annemie pricked out designs, and 
she had conceived a great regard and sorrow 
for her ; and when Annemie had become too 
ailing and aged to go herself any longer to the 
lace-maker’s place, Bebee had begged leave for 
her to have the patterns at home, and had 
carried them to and fro for her for the last three 
or four years, doing many other little useful 
services for the lone old soul as well, — -services 
which Annemie hardly perceived, she had 
grown so used to them, and her feeble intelli- 
gence was so sunk in the one absorbing idea 
that she must watch all the days through and 
all the years through for the coming of the 
dead man and the lost brig. 

Bebee put the lace patterns in her basket, 
and trotted home, her sabots clattering on the 
stones. 

“ What it must be to care for any one like 
that ! ” she thought, and by some vague asso- 
ciation of thought that she could not have pur- 
sued, she lifted the leaves and looked at the 
moss-rosebud. 

It was quite dead. 


82 


b£b£e. 


CHAPTER VII. 


S she got clear of the city and out on her 



Jr\ country road, a shadow fell across her 
in the evening light. 

“Have you had a good day, little one?” 
asked a voice that made her stop with a curious 
vague expectancy and pleasure. 

“It is you! ” she said, with a little cry, as 
she saw her friend of the silk stockings leaning 
'^on a gate midway in the green and solitary 
road that leads to Laeken. 

“Yes, it is I,” he answered, as he joined her. 
“ Have you forgiven me, Bebee? ” 

She looked at him with frank, appealing 
eyes, like those of a child in fault. 

“ Oh, I did not sleep all night 1 ” she said, 
simply. “ I thought I had been rude and un- 
grateful, and I could not be sure I had done 
right, though to have done otherwise would 
certainly have bee^n wrong.” 

He laughed. 

“ Well, that is a clearer deductioAi than is to 
be drawn from most moral uncertainties. Do 
not think twice about the matter, my dear. I 
have not, I assure you.” 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 83 


“No! ” 

She was a little disappointed. It seemed 
such an immense thing to her; and she had 
lain awake all the night, turning it about in her 
little brain, and appealing vainly for help in it 
to the sixteen sleep-angels. 

“ No, indeed. And where are you going so 
fast, as if those wooden shoes of yours were 
sandals of Mercury? ” 

“ Mercury — is that a shoemaker? ” 

“ No, my dear. He did a terrible bit of cob- 
bling once, when he made Womao. But he did 
not shoe her feet with swiftness that I know of; 
she only runs away to be run after, and if you 
do not pursue her, she comes back — always.” 

Bebee did not understand at all. 

“ I thought God made women,” she said, a 
little awe-stricken. 

“ You call it God. People three thousand 
years ago called it Mercury or Hermes. Both 
mean the same thing, — mere words to desig- 
nate an unknown quality. Where are you 
going? Does your home lie here?” 

“Yes, onward, quite far onward,” said Bebee, 
wondering that he had forgotten all she had 
told him the day before about her hut, her 
garden, and her neighbors. “You did not 
come and finish your picture to-day: why was 
that? I had a rosebud for you, but it is dead 
now.” 

“ I went to Anvers. You looked for me a 
little, then? ” 


84 


bAbAe, 


“ Oh, all day long. For I was so afraid I 
had been ungrateful.” 

“That is very pretty of you. Women are 
never grateful, my dear, except when they are 
very ill-treated. Mercury, whom we were talk- 
ing of, gave them, among other gifts, a dog’s 
heart.” 

Bebee felt bewildered ; she did not reason 
about it, but the idle, shallow, cynical tone 
pained her by its levity and its unlikeness to 
the sweet, still, gray summer evening. 

“Why are you in such a hurry?” he pur- 
sued. “ The night is cool, and it is only seven 
o’clock. I will walk part of the way with 
you.” 

“ I am in a hurry because I have Annemie’s 
patterns to do,” said Bebee, glad that he spoke 
of a thing that she knew how to answer. “You 
see, Annemie’s hand shakes and her eyes are 
dim, and she pricks the pattern all awry and 
never perceives it ; it would break her heart if 
one showed her so, but the Baes would not 
take them as they are ; they are of no use at 
all. So I prick them out myself on fresh 
paper, and the Baes thinks it is all her doing, 
and pays her the same money, and she is quite 
content. And as I carry the patterns to and fro 
for her, because she cannot walk, it is easy to 
cheat her like that; and it is no harm to cheat 
sOy you know.” He was silent. 

“You are a good little girl, Bebee, I can 
see,” he said at last, with a graver sound in his 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 85 

voice. “ And who is this Annemie for whom 
you do so much? an old woman, I suppose.” 

“ Oh, yes, quite old ; incredibly old. Her 
man was drowned at sea sixty years ago, and 
she watches for his brig still, night and morn- 
ing.” 

“The dog’s heart. No doubt he beat her, 
and had a wife in fifty other ports.” 

“ Oh, no ! ” said Bebee, with a little cry, as 
though the word against the dead man hurt 
her. “She has told me so much of him. He 
was as go6d as good could be, and loved her 
so, and between the voyages they were so 
happy. Surely that must have been sixty years 
now, and she is so sorry still, and still will not 
believe that he was drowned.” 

He looked down on her with a smile that 
had a certain pity in it. 

“ Well, yes ; there are women like that, I be- 
lieve. But be very sure, my dear, he beat her. 
Of the two, one always holds the whip and uses 
it, the other crouches.” 

“ I do not understand,” said Bebee. 

“No; but you will.” 

“ I will? — when? ” 

He smiled again. 

“ Oh — to-morrow, perhaps, or next year — 
or when Fate fancies.” 

“ Or rather, when I choose,” he thought to 
himself, and let his eyes rest with a certain 
pleasure on the little feet, that went beside him 
in the grass, and the pretty fair bosom that 


86 


bAbAe, 


showed ever and again, as the frills of her linen 
bodice were blown back by the wind and her 
own quick motion. 

Bebee looked also up at him ; he was very 
handsome, and looked so to her, after the 
broad, blunt, characterless faces of the Walloon 
peasantry around her. He walked with an 
easy grace, he was clad in picture-like velvets, he 
had a beautiful poetic head, and eyes like deep 
brown waters, and a face like one of Jordaens' 
or Rembrandt’s cavaliers in the galleries where 
she used to steal in of a Sunday, and look up at 
the paintings, and dream of what that world 
could be in which those people had lived. 

“ You are of the people of Rubes’ country, are 
you not? ” she asked him. 

“ Of what country, my dear? ” 

“Of the people that live in the gold frames,” 
said Bebee, quite seriously. “ In the galleries, 
you know. I know a charwoman that scrubs 
the floors of the Arenberg Palace, and she lets 
me in sometimes to look; and you are just like 
those great gentlemen in the gold frames, only 
you have not a hawk and a sword, and they 
always have. I used to wonder where they 
came from, for they are not like any of us one 
bit, and the charwoman — she is Lisa Dredel, 
and lives in the street of the Pot d’Etain — 
always said, ‘ Dear heart, they all belong to 
Rubes’ land ; we never see their like nowa- 
days.’ But j'ou must come out of Rubes’ land ; 
at least, I think so, do you not? ” 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 87 

He caught her meaning; he knew that Rubes 
was the homely abbreviation of Rubens that 
all the Netherlanders used, and he guessed the 
idea that was reality to this little lonely fanciful 
mind. 

“Perhaps I do,” he answered her with a 



smile, for it was not worth his while to disabuse 
her thoughts of any imagination that glorified 
him to her. “ Do you not want to see Rubes’ 
world, little one? To see the gold and the 
grandeur, and the glitter of it all? — never to 


88 


b£bAe, 


toil or get tired ? — always to move in a 
pageant? — always to live like the hawks in the 
paintings you talk of, with silver bells hung 
round you, and a hood all sewn with pearls? ” 

“ No,” said Bebee, simply. “I should like 
to see it, just to see it, as one looks through a 
grating into the king’s grape-houses here. But 
I should not like to live in it. I love my hut, 
and the starling, and the chickens, and what 
would the garden do without me ? and the 
children, and the old Annemie? I could not 
anyhow, anywhere, be any happier than I am. 
There is only one thing I wish.” 

“ And what is that? ” 

“ To know something ; not to be so igno- 
rant. Just look — I can read a little, it is true : 
my Hours, and the letters, and when Krebs 
brings in a newspaper I can read a little of it, 
not much. I know French well, because 
Antoine was French himself, and never did 
talk Flemish to me ; and they being Nether- 
landers, cannot, of course, read the newspapers 
at all, and so think it very wonderful indeed in 
me. But what I want is to know things, to 
know all about what was before ever I was 
living. St. Gudule now — they say it was built 
hundreds of years before; and Rubes again — 
they say he was a painter king in Antwerpen 
before the oldest, oldest woman like Annemie 
ever began to count time. I am sure books 
tell you all those things, because I see the 
students coming and going with them; and 


OR TWO LITTLE WO ODE AT SHOES. 89 

when I saw once the millions of books in the 
Rue du Musee, I asked the keeper what use 
they were for, and he said, ‘ To make men wise, 
my dear.’ But Gringoire Bac, the cobbler, who 
was with me, — it was a f^te day, — Bac, he 
said, ‘Do not you believe that, Bebee ; they 
only muddle folks’ brains ; for one book tells 
them one thing, and another book another, and 
so on, till they are dazed with all the contrary 
lying; and if you see a bookish man, be sure 
you see a very poor creature who could not 
hoe a patch, or kill a pig, or stitch an upper- 
leather, were it ever so.’ But I do not believe 
that Bac said right. Did he?” 

“ I am not sure. On the whole, I think it is 
the truest remark on literature I have ever 
heard, and one that shows great judgment in 
Bac. Well?” 

“ Well, sometimes, you know,” said Bebee, 
not understanding his answer, but pursuing her 
thoughts confidentially, — “sometimes I talk 
like this to the neighbors, and' they laugh at 
me. Because Mere Krebs says that when one 
knows how to spin and sweep and make bread 
and say one’s prayers and milk a goat or a cow, 
it is all a woman wants to know this side of 
heaven. But for me, I cannot help it, when 
I look at those windows in the cathedral, or at 
those beautiful twisted little spires that are all 
over ourHdtel de Ville,I want to know who the 
men were that made them, — what they did 
and thought, — how they looked and spoke, — 


90 


b&b^:e. 


how they learned to shape stone into leaves and 
grasses like that, — how they could imagine all 
those angel faces on the glass. When I go 
alone in the quite early morning or at night 
when it is still — sometimes in winter I have to 
stay till it is dark over the lace — I hear their 
feet come after me, and they whisper to me 
close, ‘ Look what beautiful things we have 
done, Bebee, and you all forget us quite. We 
did what never will die, but our names are as 
dead as the stones.’ And then I am so sorry 
for them and ashamed. And I want to know 
more. Can you tell me? ” 

He looked at her earnestly ; her eyes were 
shining, her cheeks were warm, her little mouth 
was tremulous with eagerness. 

“ Did any one ever speak to you in that 
way ? ” he asked her. 

“ No,” she answered him. “ It comes into 
my head of itself. Sometimes I think the 
cathedral angels put it there. For the angels 
must be tired, you know ; always pointing to 
God and always seeing men turn away. I used 
to tell Antoine sometimes. But he used to 
shake his head and say that it was no use think- 
ing; most likely St. Gudule and St. Michael 
had set the church down in the night all ready 
made, why not? God made the trees, and 
they were more wonderful, he thought, for his 
part. And so perhaps they are, but that is no 
answer. And I do want to know. I want 
some one who will tell me ; and if you come 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 91 

out of Rubes’ country as I think, no doubt you 
know everything, or remember it? ” 

He smiled. 

“The free pass to Rubes’ country lies in 
books, pretty one. Shall I give you some? — 
nay, lend them, I mean, since giving you are 
too wilful to hear of without offence. You 
can read, you said?” 

Bebee’s eyes glowed as they lifted themselves 
to his. 

“ I can read — not very fast, but that would 
come with doing it more and more, I think, just 
as spinning does ; one knots the thread and 
breaks it a million times before one learns to 
spin as fine as cobwebs. I have read the 
stories of St. Anne, and of St. Catherine, and 
of St. Luven fifty times, but they are all the 
books that Father Francis has; and no one 
else has any among us.” 

“Very well. You shall have books of mine. 
Easy ones first, and then those that are more 
serious. But what time will you have? You 
do so much ; you are like a little golden bee.” 

Bebee laughed happily. 

“ Oh ! give me the books and I will find the 
time. It is light so early now. That gives one 
so many hours. In winter one has so few one 
must lie in bed, because to buy a candle you know 
one cannot afford except, of course, a taper now 
and then, as one’s duty is, for our Lady or for 
the dead. And will you really, really, lend me 
books? ” 


92 


bAbAe, 


“ Really, I will. Yes. I will bring you 
one to the Grande Place to-morrow, or meet 
you on your road there with it. Do you know 
what poetry is, Bebee?” 

“No.” 

“But your flowers talk to you?” 

“ Ah ! always. But then no one else hears 
them ever but me ; and so no one else ever 
believes.” 

“Well, poets are folks who hear the flowers 
talk as you do, and the trees, and the seas, and 
the beasts, and even the stones ; but no one 
else ever hears these things, and so, when the 
poets write them out, the rest of the world say, 
^That is very fine, no doubt, but only good for 
dreamers ; it will bake no bread.’ I will give 
you some poetry; for I think you care more 
about dreams than about bread.” 

“ I do not know,” said Bebee ; and she did 
not know, for her dreams, like her youth, and 
her innocence, and her simplicity, and her 
strength, were all unconscious of themselves, as 
such things must be to be pure and true at all. 

Bebee had grown up straight, and clean, and 
fragrant, and joyous as one of her own carna- 
tions ; but she knew herself no more than the 
carnation knows its color and its root. 

“ No, you do not know,” said he, with a sort 
of pity ; and thought within himself, was it 
worth while to let her know? 

If she did not know, these vague aspirations 
and imaginations would drop off from her with 


OR TWO L/TTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


93 


the years of her early youth, as the lime-flowers 
drop downwards with the summer heats. She 
would forget them. They would linger a little 
in her head, and, perhaps, always wake at some 
sunset hour or some angelus chime, but not to 
trouble her. Only to make her cradle song a 
little sadder and softer than most women’s was. 
Unfed, they would sink away and bear no blos- 
som. 

She would grow into a simple, hardy, hard- 
working, God-fearing Flemish woman like the 
rest. She would marry, no doubt, some time, 
and rear her children honestly and well ; and 
sit in the market stall every day, and spin and 
sew, and dig and wash, and sweep, and brave 
bad weather, and be content with poor food to 
the end of her harmless and laborious days — 
poor little Bebee ! 

He saw her so clearly as she would be — if 
he let her alone. 

A little taller, a little broader, a little browner, 
less sweet of voice, less soft of skin, less flower- 
like in face ; having learned to think only as 
her neighbors thought, of price of wood and 
cost of bread ; laboring cheerily but hardly 
from daybreak to nightfall to fill hungry 
mouths ; forgetting all things except the little 
curly-heads clustered round her soup-pot, and 
the year-old lips sucking at her breasts. 

A blameless life, an eventless life, a life as 
clear as the dewdrop, and as colorless ; a life 
opening, passing, ending in the little green 


94 




wooded lane, by the bit of water where the 
swans made their nests under the willows ; a 
life like the life of millions, a little purer, a little 
brighter, a little more tender, perhaps, than 
those lives usually are, but otherwise as like 
them as one ear of barley is like another as it 
rises from the soil, and blows in the wind, and 
turns brown in the strong summer sun, and then 
goes down to the sod again under the sickle. 

He saw her just as she would be — if he let 
her alone. 

But should he leave her alone? 

He cared nothing; only her eyes had such a 
pretty, frank, innocent look like a bird’s in 
them, and she had been so brave and bold with 
him about those silken stockings ; and this 
little ignorant, dreamful mind of hers was so 
like a blush rosebud, which looks so close-shut, 
and so sweet-smelling, and so tempting fold 
within fold, that a child will pull it open, forget- 
ful that he will spoil it forever from being a 
full-grown rose, and that he will let the dust, 
and the sun, and the bee into its tender bosom 
— and men are true children, and women are 
their rosebuds. 

Thinking only of keeping well with this 
strange and beautiful wayfarer from that un- 
known paradise of Rubes’ country, Bebee lifted 
up the vine-leaves of her basket. 

“ I took a flower for you to-day, but it is 
dead. Look ; to-morrow, if you will be there, 
you shall have the best in all the garden.” 


OR TWO LITTLE WO ODE AT SHOES. 


95 


“You wish to see me again then?” he asked 
her. Bebee looked at him with troubled eyes, 
but with a sweet frank faith that had no hesita- 
tion in it. 

“ Yes ! you are not like anything I ever 
knew, and if you will only help me to learn a 
little. Sometimes I think I am not stupid, 
only ignorant ; but I cannot be sure unless I try.” 

He smiled ; he was listlessly amused ; the 
day before he had tempted the child merely 
because she was pretty, and to tempt her in 
that way seemed the natural course of things, 
but now there was something in her that 
touched him differently ; the end would be the 
same, but he would change the means. 

The sun had set. There was a low, dull red 
glow still on the far edge of the plains — that 
was all. In the distant cottages little lights 
were twinkling. The path grew dark. 

“ I will go away and let her alone,” he 
thought. “ Poor little soul ! it would give 
itself lavishly, it would never be bought. I 
will let it alone ; the mind will go to sleep and 
the body will keep healthy, and strong, and 
pure, as people call it. It would be a pity to 
play with both a day, and then throw them 
away as the boy threw the pear-blossom. She 
is a little clod of earth that has field flowers 
growing in it. I will let her alone, the flowers 
under the plough in due course will die, and she 
will be content among the other clods, — if I 
let her alone.” 


96 




At that moment there went across the dark 
fields, against the dusky red sky, a young man 
with a pile of brushwood on his back, and a 
hatchet in his hand. 

“You are late, Bebee,” he called to her in 
Flemish, and scowled at the stranger by her 
side. 

“A good-looking lad; who is it?” said her 
companion. 



‘^ That is Jeannot, the son of old Sophie,” 
she answered him. “ He is so good — oh, so 
good, you cannot think ; he keeps his mother 
and three little sisters, and works so very, very 
hard in the forest, and yet he often finds time 
to dig my garden for me, and he chops all my 
wood in winter.” 

They had come to where the road goes up 
by the king’s summer palace. They were under 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


97 


great hanging beeches and limes. There was a 
high gray wall, and over it the blossoming 
fruit boughs hung. In a ditch full of long 
grass little kids bleated by their mothers. Away 
on the left went the green fields of colza, and 
beetroot, and trefoil, with big forest trees here 
and there in their midst, and, against the blue 
low line of the far horizon, red mill-sails, and 
gray church spires; dreamy plaintive bells far 
away somewhere were ringing the sad Flemish 
carillon. 

He paused and looked at her. 

“ I must bid you good night, Bebee ; you 
are near your home now.” 

She paused too and looked at him. 

“ But I shall see you to-morrow? ” 

There was the wistful, eager, anxious uncon- 
sciousness of appeal as when the night before 
she had asked him if he were angry. 

He hesitated a moment. If he said no, and 
went away out of the city wherever his listless 
and changeful whim called him, he knew how 
it would be with her ; he knew what her life 
would be as surely as he knew the peach would 
come out of the peach-flower rosy on the wall 
there : life in the little hut ; among the neigh- 
bors ; sleepy and safe and soulless; — if he let 
her alone. 

If he stayed and saw her on the morrow he 
knew, too, the end as surely as he knew that 
the branch of white pear-blossom,' which in care- 
lessness he had knocked down with a stone on 


98 


bAbj^e, 


the grass yonder, would fade in the night and 
would never bring forth its sweet, simple fruit 
in the sunshine. 

To leave the peach-flower to come to ma- 
turity and be plucked by a peasant, or to pull 
down the pear-blossom and rifle the buds? 

Carelessly and languidly he balanced the 
question with himself, whilst Bebee, forgetful of 
the lace patterns and the flight of the hours, 
stood looking at him with anxious and plead- 
ing eyes, thinking only — was he angry again, 
or would he really bring her the books and 
make her wise, and let her know the stories of 
the past? 

“ Shall I see you to-morrow? ” she said wist- 
fully. 

Should she? — if he left the peach-blossom 
safe on the wall, Jeannot the woodcutter would 
come by and by and gather the fruit. 

If he left the clod of earth in its pasture with 
all its daisies untouched, this black-browed 
young peasant would cut it round with his 
hatchet and carry it to his wicker cage, that 
the homely brown lark of his love might sing 
to it some stupid wood note under a cottage 
eave. 

The sight of the strong young forester going 
over the darkened fields against the dull red 
skies was as a feather that suffices to sway to 
one side a balance that hangs on a hair. 

He had been inclined to leave her alone when 
he saw in his fancy the clean, simple, mindless, 


O/^ TWO LITTLE WOOTE.V SHOES. 


99 


honest life that her fanciful girlhood would 
settle down into as time should go on. But 
when in the figure of the woodman there was 
painted visibly on the dusky sky that end for 
her which he had foreseen, he was not indiffer- 
ent to it ; he resented it ; he was stirred to a 
vague desire to render it impossible. 

If Jeannot had not gone by across the fields 
he would have left her and let her alone from 
that night thenceforwards ; as it was, — 

“ Good night, Bebee,” he said to her. To- 
morrow I will finish the Broodhuis and bring 
you your first book. Do not dream too much, 
or you will prick your lace patterns all awry. 
Good night, pretty one.” 

Then he turned and went back through the 
green dim lanes to the city. 

Bebee stood a moment looking after him, 
with a happy smile ; then she picked up the 
fallen pear-blossom, and ran home as fast as 
her feet would take her. 

That night she worked very late watering 
her flowers, and trimming them, and then ironing 
out a little clean white cap for the morrow ; and 
then sitting down under the open lattice to. 
prick out all old Annemie’s designs by the 
strong light of the full moon that flooded her 
hut with its radiance. 

But she sang all the time she worked, and 
the gay, pretty, wordless songs floated across 
the water and across the fields, and woke some 
old people in their beds as they lay with their 


lOO 


bAbAe, 


windows open, and they turned and crossed 
themselves, and said, “ Dear heart ! — this is 
the eve of the Ascension, and the angels are so 
near we hear them.” 

But it was no angel ; only the thing that is 
nearer heaven than anything else, — a little 
human heart that is happy and innocent. 

Bebee had only one sorrow that night. The 
pear-blossoms were all dead ; and no care 
could call them back even for an hour’s bloom- 
ing. 

“He did not think when he struck them 
down,” she said to herself, regretfully. 


OR TWO LITTLE WO ODE SHOES. 


lOI 


CHAPTER VIIL 

AN I do any work for you, Bebee?” 



said black Jeannot in the daybreak, 
pushing her gate open timidly with one hand. 

“ There is none to do, Jeannot. They want 
so little in this time of the year — the flowers,” 
said she, lifting her head from the sweet-peas 
she was tying up to their sticks. 

The woodman did not answer; he leaned 
over the half-open wicket, and swayed it back- 
wards and forwards under his bare arm. He 
was a good, harmless, gentle fellow, swarthy 
as charcoal and simple as a child, and quite 
ignorant, having spent all his days in the great 
Soignies forests making fagots when he was a 
little lad, and hewing down trees or burning 
charcoal as he grew to manhood. 

“ Who was that seigneur with you last night, 
Bebee?” he asked, after a long silence, watch- 
ing her as she moved. 

Bebee’s eyes grew very soft, but they looked 
up frankly. 

“I am not sure — I think he is a painter — r 
a great painter prince, I mean — as Rubes was 
in Antwerpen ; he wanted roses the night be- 
fore last in the cathedral.” 


102 




“ But he was walking with you ? ” 

“ He was in the lane as I came home last 
night — yes.” 

“ What does he give you for your roses? ” 

“ Oh ! he pays me well. How is your 
mother this day, Jeannot? ” 

“You do not like to talk of him? ” 

“Why should you want to talk of him? 

; is nothing to you.” 

“ Did you really see 
him only two days ago, 
Bebee?” 

“Oh, Jeannot! did I 
ever tell a falsehood ? You 
would not say that to one 
of your little sisters.” 

The forester swayed 
the gate to and fro 
drearily under his 
folded arms. 

Bebee, not regard- 
ing him, cut her 
flowers, and filled 
her baskets, and 
did her other work, 
and set a ladder 
against the hut and 
climbed on its low roof to seek for eggs, the 
hens having green tastes sometimes for the 
rushes and lichens of its thatch. She found two 
eggs, which she promised herself to take to 
Annemie, and looking round as she sat on the 



OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


103 


edge of the roof, with one foot on the highest 
rung of the ladder, saw that Jeannot was still 
at the gate. 

“ You will be late in. the forest, Jeannot,” she 
cried to him. It is such a long, long way in 
and out. Why do you look so sulky? and you 
are kicking the wicket to pieces.” 

“ I do not like you to talk with strangers,” 
said Jeannot, sullenly and sadly. 

Bebee laughed as she sat on the edge of the 
thatch, and looked at the shining gray skies of 
the early day, and the dew-wet garden, and the 
green fields beyond, with happy eyes that made 
the familiar scene transfigured to her. 

“ Oh, Jeannot, what nonsense ! As if I do 
not talk to a million strangers every summer ! 
as if I could ever sell a flower if I did not ! You 
are cross this morning; that is what it is.” 

“ Do you know the man’s name? ” said Jean- 
not, suddenly. 

Bebee felt her cheeks grow warm as with 
some noonday heat of sunshine. She thought 
it was with anger against blundering Jeannot’s 
curiosity. 

“ No ! and what would his name be to us, if I 
did know it? I cannot ask people’s names be- 
cause they buy my roses.” 

“ As if it were only roses ! ” 

There was the length of the garden between 
them, and Bebee did not hear as she sat on the 
edge of her roof with that light dreamful enjoy- 
ment of air and sky and coolness, and all the 


104 


bAb&e, 


beauty of the dawning day, which the sweet 
vague sense of a personal happiness will bring 
with it to the dullest and the coldest. 

“You are cross, Jeannot, that is what it is,’’ 
she said, after a while. “ You should not be 
cross ; you are too big and strong and good. 
Go in and get my bowl of bread and milk for 
me, and hand it to me up here. It is so pleas- 
ant. It is as nice as being perched on an 
apple-tree.” 

Jeannot went in obediently and handed rp 
her breakfast to her, looking at her with sh}*, 
worshipping eyes. But his face was overcast, 
and he sighed heavily as he took up his 
hatchet and turned away; for he was the sole 
support of his mother and sisters, and if he did 
not do his work in Soignies they would starve 
at home. 

“ You will be seeing that stranger again ^ ” he 
asked her. 

“ Yes ! ” she answered with a glad triumph in 
her eyes ; not thinking at all of him as she 
spoke. “You ought to go, Jeannot, now; you 
are so late. I will come and see your mother 
to-morrow. And do not be cross, you dear 
big Jeannot. Days are too short to snip them 
up into little bits by bad temper ; it is only a 
stupid sheep-shearer that spoils the fleece by 
snapping at it sharp and hard ; that is what 
Father Francis says.” 

Bebee, having delivered her little piece of wis- 
dom, broke her bread into her milk and ate it, 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


105 


lifting her face to the fresh wind and tossing 
crumbs to the wheeling swallows, and watching 
the rose-bushes nod and toss below in the breeze, 
and thinking vaguely how happy a thing it was 
to live. 

Jeannot looked up at her, then went on his 
slow sad way through the wet lavender-shrubs 
and the opening buds of the lilies. 

“ You will only think of that stranger, Bebee, 
never of any of us — never again,” he said; 
and wearily opened the little gate and went 
through it, and down the daybreak stillness of 
the lane. It was a foolish thing to say ; but 
when were lovers ever wise ? 

Bebee did not heed ; she did not understand 
herself or him ; she only knew that she was 
happy; when one knows that, one does not 
want to seek much further. 

She sat on the thatch and took her bread 
and milk in the gray clear air, with the swallows 
circling above her head, and one or two of them 
even resting a second on the edge of the bowl 
to peck at the food from the big wooden spoon ; 
they had known her all the sixteen summers of 
her life, and were her playfellows, only they 
would never tell her anything of what they saw 
in winter over the seas. That was her only 
quarrel with them. Swallows do not tell their 
secrets They have the weird of Procne on 
them all. 

The sun came and touched the lichens of the 
roof into gold. 


io6 




Bebee smiled at it gayly as it rose above the 
tops of the trees, and shone on all the little 
villages scattered over the plains. 

“ Ah, dear Sun ! ” she cried to it. “ I am 
going to be wise. I am going into great Rubes" 
country. I am going to hear of the Past and 
the Future. I am going to listen to what the 
Poets say. The swallows never would tell me 
anything ; but now I shall know as much as they 
know. Are you not glad for me, O Sun ? ” 

The Sun came over the trees, and heard and 
said nothing. If he had answered at all he 
must have said, — 

“The only time when a human soul is either 
wise or happy is in that one single moment 
when the hour of my own shining or of the 
moon’s beaming seems to that single soul to be 
past and present and future, to be at once the 
creation and the end of all things. Faust knew 
that; so will you.” 

But the Sun shone on and held his peace. 
He sees all things ripen and fall. He can wait. 
He knows the end. It is always the same. 

He brings the fruit out of the peach-flower, and 
rounds it and touches it into ruddiest rose and 
softest gold ; but the sun knows well that the 
peach must drop — whether into the basket to be 
eaten by kings, or on to the turf to be eaten by 
ants. What matter which very much after all? 

The Sun is not a cynic ; he is only wise be- 
cause he is Life and he is Death, the creator 
and the corrupter of all things. 


QR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 107 


CHAPTER IX. 

B ut Bebee, who only saw in the sun the sign 
of daily work, the brightness of the face of 
the world, the friend of the flowers, the harvest- 
man of the poor, the playmate of the birds and 
butterflies, the kindly light that the waking 
birds and the ringing carillon welcomed, — 
Bebee, who was not at all afraid of him, smiled 
at his rays and saw in them only fairest promise 
of a cloudless midsummer day as she gave her 
last crumb to the swallows, dropped down off 
the thatch, and busied herself in making bread 
that Mere Krebs would bake for her, until it 
was time to cut her flowers and go down into 
the town. 

When her loaves were made and she had run 
over with them to the mill-house and back 
again, she attired herself with more heed than 
usual, and ran to look at her own face in the 
mirror of the deep well-water — other glass she 
had none. 

She was used to hear herself called pretty ; 
but she had never thought about it at all till 
now. The people loved her ; she had always 
believed that they had only said it as a sort of 


io8 


b&bAe, 


kindness, as they said, “ God keep you.” But 
now — 

“ He told me I was like a flower,” she thought 





to herself, and hung over the well to see. She 
did not know very well what he had meant ; 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SILOES. 


109 


but the sentence stirred in her heart as a little 
bird under tremulous leaves. 

She waited ten minutes full, leaning and 
looking down, while her eyes, that were like 
the blue iris, smiled back to her from the brown 
depths below. Then she went and kneeled 
down before the old shrine in the wall of the 
garden. 

“Dear and holy Mother of Jesus, I do thank 
you that you made me a little good to look at,” 
she said, softly. “ Keep me as you keep the 
flowers, and let my face be always fair, because 
it is a pleasure to be a pleasure. Ah, dear 
Mother, I say it so badly, and it sounds so vain, 
I know. But I do not think you will be angry, 
will you? And I am going to try to be wise.” 

Then she murmured an ave or two, to be in 
form as it were, and then rose and ran along 
the lanes with her baskets, and brushed the 
dew lightly over her bare feet, and sang a 
little Flemish song for very joyousness, as the 
birds sing in the apple bough. 

She got the money for Annemie and took it 
to her with fresh patterns to prick, and the 
new-laid eggs. 

“ I wonder what he meant by a dog’s heart? ” 
she thought to herself, as she left the old 
woman sitting by the hole in the roof pricking 
out the parchment in all faith that she earned 
her money, and looking every now and then 
through the forests of masts for the brig with 
the hank of flax flying, — the brig that had 


I lO 


bAbAe, 


foundered fifty long years before in the northern 
seas, and in the days of her youth. 

“What is the dog’s heart?” thought Bebee ; 
she had seen a dog she knew — a dog which all 
his life long had dragged heavy loads under 
brutal stripes along the streets of Brussels — 
stretch himself on the grave of his taskmaster 
and refuse to eat, and persist in lying there 
until he died, though he had no memory ex- 
cept of stripes, and no tie to the dead except 
pain and sorrow. Was it a heart like this that 
he meant? 

“Was her sailor, indeed, so good to her?” 
she asked an old gossip of Annemie’s, as she 
went down the stairs. 

The old soul stopped to think with difficulty 
of such a far-off time, and resting her brass 
flagon of milk on the steep step. 

“ Eh, no ; not that I ever saw,” she answered 
at length. “ He was fond of her — very fond ; 
but he was a wilful one, and he beat her some- 
times when he got tired of being on land. But 
women must not mind that, you know, my dear, 
if only a man’s heart is right. Things fret them, 
and then they belabor what they love best ; it 
is a way they have.” 

“ But she speaks of him as of an angel 
nearly ! ” said Bebee, bewildered. 

The old woman took up her flagon, with a 
smile flitting across her wintry face. 

“Ay, dear; when the frost kills your brave 
rose-bush, root and bud, do you think of the 


OR TWO LITTLE WOOD EM SHOES. 


II 


thorns that pricked you, or only of the fair, 
sweet-smelling things that flowered all your 
summer? ” 

Bebee went away thoughtfully out of the old 
crazy water-washed house by the quay ; life 
seemed growing very strange and intricate and 
knotted about her, like the threads of lace that 
a bad fairy has entangled in the night. 


12 


bAb^e, 


CHAPTER X. 

H er stranger from Rubes’ land was a great 
man in a certain world. He had become 
great when young, which is perhaps a mis- 
fortune. It indisposes men to be great at their 
maturity. He was famous at twenty, by a 
picture hectic in color, perfect in drawing, that 
made Paris at his feet. He became more 
famous by verses, by plays, by political follies, 
and by social successes. He was faithful, how- 
ever, to his first love in art. He was a great 
painter, and year by year proved afresh the 
cunning of his hand. Purists said his pictures 
had no soul in them. It was not wonderful if 
they had none. He always painted soulless 
vice ; indeed, he saw very little else. 

One year he had some political trouble. He 
wrote a witty pamphlet that hurt where it 
was perilous to aim. He laughed and crossed 
the border, riding into the green Ardennes one 
sunny evening. He had a name of some 
power and sufficient wealth ; he did not feel 
long exile. Meanwhile he told himself he 
would go and look at Scheffer’s Gretchen. 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


"3 


The King of Thule is better ; but people talk 
most of the Gretchen. He had never seen 
either. 

He went in leisurely, travelling up the bright 
Meuse River, and across the monotony of the 
plains, then green with wheat a foot high, and 
musical with the many bells of the Easter ker- 
messes in the quaint old-world villages. 

There was something so novel, so sleepy, so 
harmless, so mediaeval, in the Flemish life, that 
it soothed him. He had been swimming all his 
life in salt sea-fed rapids ; this sluggish, dull, 
canal water, mirroring between its rushes a life 
that had scarcely changed for centuries, had a 
charm for him. 

He stayed awhile in Antwerpen. The town 
is ugly and beautiful; it is like a dull quaint 
gres de Flandre jug, that has precious stones 
set inside its rim. It is a burgher ledger of 
bales and barrels, of sale and barter, of loss and 
gain ; but in the heart of it there are illumi- 
nated leaves of missal vellum, all gold and 
color, and monkish story and heroic ballad, 
that could only have been executed in the days 
when Art was a religion. 

He gazed himself into an homage of Rubens, 
whom before he had slighted, never having 
known (for, unless you have seen Antwerp, it 
is as absurd to say that you have seen Rubens, 
as it is to think that you have seen Murillo out 
of Seville, or Rafifaelle out of Rome) ; and he 
studied the Gretchen carefully, delicately, sym- 


b£bAe, 


114 

pathetically, for he loved Scheffer; but though 
he tried, he failed to care for her. 

“ She is only a peasant; she is not a poem,” 
he said to himself; “ I will paint a Gretchen for 
the Salon of next year.” 

But it was hard for him to portray a Gret- 
chen. All his pictures were Phryne, — Phryne 
in triumph, in ruin, in a palace, in a poor- 
house, on a bed of roses, on a hospital mat- 
tress ; Phryne laughing with a belt of jewels 
about her supple waist ; Phryne lying with the 
stones of the dead-house under her naked 
limbs, — but always Phryne. Phryne, who liv- 
ing had death in her smile ; Phryne, who life- 
less had blank despair on her face ; Phryne, a 
thing that lived furiously every second of her 
days, but Phryne a thing that once being dead 
was carrion that never could live again. 

Phryne has many painters in this school, as 
many as Catherine and Cecilia had in the 
schools of the Renaissance, and he was chief 
amidst them. 

How could he paint Gretchen if the pure 
Scheffer missed? Not even if, like the artist 
monks of old, he steeped his brushes all Lent 
through in holy water. 

And in holy water he did not believe. 

One evening, having left Antwerpen ringing 
its innumerable bells over the grave of its dead 
Art, he leaned out of the casement of an ab- 
sent friend’s old palace in the Brabant street 
that is named after Mary of Burgundy; an old 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


115 

casement crusted with quaint carvings, and 
gilded round in Spanish fashion, with many 
gargoyles and griffins, and illegible scutcheons. 

Leaning there, wondering with himself 
whether he would wait awhile and paint quietly 
in this dim street, haunted with the shades of 
Memling and Maes, and Otto Veneris and 
Philip de Champagne, or whether he would go 
into the East and seek new types, and lie under 
the red Egyptian heavens and create a true 
Cleopatra, which no man has ever done yet, — 
a young Cleopatra, ankle-deep in roses and 
fresh from Caesar’s kisses, — leaning there, he 
saw a little peasant go by below, with two little 
white feet in two wooden shoes, and a face that 
had the pure and simple radiance of a flower. 

“There is my Gretchen,” he thought to him- 
self, and went down and followed her into the 
cathedral. If he could get what was in her 
face, he would get what Scheffer could not. 

A little later walking by her in the green 
lanes, he meditated, “ It is the face of Gretchen, 
but not the soul — the Red Mouse has never 
passed this child’s lips. Nevertheless — ” 

“ Nevertheless — ” he said to himself, and 
smiled. 

For he, the painter all his life long of Phryne 
living and of Phryne dead, believed that every 
daughter of Eve either vomits the Red Mouse 
or swallows it. 

It makes so little difference which,. — either 
way the Red Mouse has been there. 


ii6 


bAbAe, 


And yet, strolling there in the dusky red of 
the evening towards this little rush-covered hut, 
he forgot the Red Mouse, and began vaguely 
to see that there are creatures of his mother’s 
sex from whom the beast of the Brocken slinks 
away. 

But he still said to himself, “Nevertheless.” 

“Nevertheless,” — for he knew well that 
when the steel cuts the silk, when the hound 
hunts the fawn, when the snake wooes the bird, 
when the king covets the vineyard, there is 
only one end possible at any time. It is the 
strong against the weak, the fierce against the 
feeble, the subtle against the simple, the 
master against the slave ; there is no equality 
in the contest and no justice — it is merely in- 
evitable, and the issue of it is written. 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


1 17 


CHAPTER XL 

T he next day she had her promised book 
hidden under .the vine-leaves of her 
empty basket as she went homeward, and 
though she had not seen him very long or 
spoken to him very much, she was happy. 

The golden gates of knowledge had just 
opened to her ; she saw a faint, far-ofif glimpse 
of the Hesperides gardens within ; of the dragon 
she had never heard, and had no fear. 

“ Might I know your name? ” she had asked 
him wistfully, as she had given him the rose- 
bud, and taken the volume in return that day. 
“They call me Flamen.” 

“ It is your name? ” 

“ Yes, for the world. You must call me 
Victor, as other women do. Why do you 
want my name? ” 

“Jeannot asked it of me.” 

“ Oh, Jeannot asked it, did he?” 

“ Yes ; besides,” said Bebee, with her eyes 
very soft and very serious, and her happy voice 
hushed, — “besides, I want to pray for you of 
course, every day; and if I do not know your 
name, how can I make Our Lady rightly under- 
stand? The flowers know you without a name. 


ii8 


bAbAe, 


but she might not, because so very many are 
always beseeching her, and you see she has all 
the world to look after.” 

He had looked at her with a curious look, 
and had bade her farewell, and let her go home 
alone that night. 

Her work was quickly done, and by the light 
of the moon she spread her book on her lap in 
the porch of the hut and began her new delight. 

The children had come and pulled at her 
skirts and begged her to play. But Bebee had 
shaken her head. 

I am going to learn to be very wise, dear,” 
she told them ; “ I shall not have time to dance 
or to play.” 

“But people are not merry when they are 
wise, Bebee,” said Franz, the biggest boy. 

“Perhaps not,” said Bebee; “ but one cannot 
be everything, you know, Franz.” 

“ But surely, you would rather be merry than 
anything else? ” 

“ I thing there is something better, Franz. I 
am not sure ; I want to find out; I will tell you 
when I know.” 

“ Who has put that into your head, Bebee? ” 

“ The angels in the cathedral,” she told 
them ; and the children were awed and left her, 
and went away to play blind-man’s-buff by 
themselves, on the grass by the swan’s water. 

“ But for all that the angels have said it,” 
said Franz to his sisters, “ I cannot see what 
good it will be to her to be wise, if she will not 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES, 


119 

care any longer afterwards for almond ginger- 
bread and currant cake.” 

It was the little tale of “Paul and Virginia” 
that he had given her to begin her studies with ; 
but it was a grand copy, full of beautiful draw- 
ings nearly at every page. 

It was hard work for her to read at first, but 
the drawings enticed and helped her, and she 
soon sank breathlessly into the charm of the 
story. Many words she did not know ; many 
passages were beyond her comprehension ; she 
was absolutely ignorant, and had nothing but 
the force of her own fancy to aid her. 

But though stumbling at every step, as a 
lame child through a flowery hillside in summer, 
she was happy as the child would be, because 
of the sweet, strange air that was blowing about 
her, and the blossoms that she could gather 
into her hand, so rare, so wonderful, and yet 
withal so familiar, because they were blossoms. 

With her fingers buried in her curls, with her 
book on her knee, with the moon rays white and 
strong on the page, Bebee sat entranced as the 
hours went by ; the children’s play shouts died 
away; the babble of the gossip at the house 
doors ceased ; people went by and called good 
night to her ; the little huts shut up one by one, 
like the white and purple convolvulus cups in 
the hedges. 

Bebee did not stir, nor did she hear them ; 
she was deaf even to the singing of the nightin- 
gales in the willows, where she sat in her little 


120 


BJ&B&E, 


dark porch, with the ivy dropping from the 
thatch above, and the wet garden-ways beyond 
her. 


A heavy step came tramping down the lane. 
A voice called to her, — 

“ What are you doing, Bebee, there, this time 
of the night? It is on the strike of twelve.” 

She started as if she were doing some evil 
thing, and stretched her arms out, and looked 
around with blinded, wondering eyes, 
as if she had been rudely wakened 
from her sleep. 

“What are you doing up so 
late?” asked Jeannot; he was com- 
ing from the forest in the dead of 
night to bring food for his family; 
he lost his sleep thus often, but he 
never thought that he did anything 
except his duty in those long, dark, 
tiring tramps to and fro between 
Soignies and Laeken. 

Bebee shut her book and smiled 
with dreaming eyes, that saw him not 



at all. 

“I was reading — and, Jeannot, his name is 
Flamen for the world, but I may call him 
Victor.” 

“What do I care for his name?” 

“ You asked it this morning.” 

“ More fool I. Why do you read? Reading 
is not for poor folk like you and me.” 


OR TWO LITTLE WOOTEN SHOES. 121 

Bebee smiled up at the white clear moon 
that sailed above the woods. 

She was not awake out of her dream. She 
only dimly heard the words he spoke. 

“ You are a little peasant,” said Jeannot 
roughly, as he paused at the gate. “ It is all 
you can do to get your bread. You have no 
one to stand between you and hunger. How 
will it be with you when the slug gets your 
roses, and the snail your carnations, and your 
hens die of damp, and your lace is all wove 
awry, because your head runs on reading and 
folly, and you are spoilt for all simple pleasures 
and for all honest work? ” 

She smiled, still looking up at the moon, 
with the dropping ivy touching her hair. 

“ You are cross, dear Jeannot. Good night.” 

A moment afterwards the little rickety door 
was shut, and the rusty bolt drawn within it; 
Jeannot stood in the cool summer night all 
alone, and knew how stupid he had been in his 
wrath. 

He leaned on the gate a minute ; then crossed 
the garden as softly as his wooden shoes would 
let him. He tapped gently on the shutter of 
the lattice. 

“Bebee — Bebee — just listen. I spoke 
roughly, dear — I know I have no right. I am 
sorry. Will you be friends with me again? — 
do be friends again.” 

She opened the shutter a little way, so that 
he could see her pretty mouth speaking. 


122 


b^bAe, 


“Oh, Jeannot, what does it matter? Yes, 
we are friends — we will always be friends, of 
course — only you do not know. Good nij^ht.” 

He went away with a heavy heart and a 1 )ng- 
drawn step. He would have preferred that she 
should have been angry with him. 

Bebee, left alone, let the clothes drop off 
her pretty round shoulders and her rosy limbs, 
and shook out her coils of hair, and kissed the 
book, and laid it under her head, and went to 
sleep with a smile on her face. 

Only, as she slept, her fingers moved as if 
she were counting her beads, and her lips 
murmured, — 

“ Oh, dear Holy Mother, you have so much 
to think of — yes, I know — all the poor, and 
all the little children. But take care of him ; he is 
called Flamen, and he lives in the street of 
Mary of Burgundy ; you cannot miss him ; and 
if you will look for him always, and have a heed 
that the angels never leave him, I will give you 
my great cactus flower — my only one — on 
your Feast of Roses this very year. Oh, dear 
Mother, you will not forget ! ” 


OR TWO LITTLE WO ODE AT SHOES. 


23 


CHAPTER XII. 

B EBEE was a dreamer in her way, and 
aspired to be a scholar too. But all the 
same, she was not a little fool. 



She had been reared in hardy, simple, honest 
ways of living, and would have thought it as 
shameful as a theft to have owed her bread to 
other folk. 

So, though she had a wakeful, restless night, 
full of strange fantasies, none the less was she 
out in her garden by daybreak ; none the less 


24 




did she sweep out her floor and make her mash 
for the fowls, and wash out her bit of linen and 
hang it to dry on a line among the tall, flaunt- 
ing hollyhocks that were so proud of them- 
selves because they reached to the roof. 

“What do you want with books, Bebee?” 
said Reine, the sabot-maker’s wife, across the 
privet hedge, as she also hung out her linen. 
“Franz told me you were reading last night. 
It is the silver buckles have done that: one 
mischief always begets another.” 

“Where is the mischief, good Reine?” said 
Bebee, who was always prettily behaved with 
her elders, though, when pushed to it, she 
could hold her own. 

“ The mischief will be in discontent,” said 
the sabot-maker’s wife. “ People live on their 
own little patch, and think it is the world ; that 
is as it should be — everybody within his own, 
like a nut in its shell. But when you get read- 
ing, you hear of a swarm of things you never 
saw, and you fret because you cannot see them, 
and you dream, and dream, and a hole is burnt 
in your soup-pot, and your dough is as heavy 
as lead. You are like bees that leave their own 
clover fields to buzz themselves dead against 
the glass of a hothouse.” 

Bebee smiled, reaching to spread out her 
linen. But she said nothing. 

“What good is it talking to them?” she 
thought; “they do not know.” 

Already the neighbors and friends of her in- 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


fancy seemed so far, far away; creatures of a 
distant world, that she had long left; it was 
no use talking, they never would understand. 

“Antoine should never have taught you your 
letters,” said Reine, groaning under the great 
blue shirts she was hanging on high among the 
leaves. “I told him so at the time. I said, 
‘The child is a good child, and spins, and sews, 
and sweeps, rare and fine for her age ; why go 
and spoil her? ’ But he was always headstrong. 
Not a child of mine knows a letter, the saints be 
praised ! nor a word of any tongue but our own- 
good Flemish. You should have been brought 
up the same. You would have come to no 
trouble then.” 

“ I am in no trouble, dear Reine,” said Bebee, 
scattering the potato-peels to the clacking 
poultry, and she smiled into the faces of the 
golden oxlips that nodded to 'her back again in 
sunshiny sympathy. 

“ Not yet,” said Reine, hanging her last shirt. 

But Bebee was not hearing ; she was calling 
the chickens, and telling the oxlips how pretty 
they looked in the borders ; and in her heart 
she was counting the minutes till the old Dutch 
cuckoo-clock at Mere Krebs’s — the only clock 
in the lane — should crow out the hour at which 
she went down to the city. 

She loved the hut, the birds, the flowers ; but 
they were little to her now compared with the 
dark golden picturesque square, the changing 
crowds, the frowning roofs, the gray stones, and 


126 


e&bAe, 


the delight of watching through the shifting 
colors and shadows of the throngs for one face 
and for one smile. 

“ He is sure to be there,” she thought, and 
started half an hour earlier than was her wont. 
S^he wanted to tell him all her rapture in the 
book ; no one else could understand. 

But all the day through he never came. 

Bebee sat with a sick heart and a parched 
little throat, selling her flowers and straining 
her eyes through the tumult of the square. 

The whole day went by, and there was no 
sign of him. 

The flowers had sold well : it was a feast 
day; her pouch was full of pence — what was 
that to her? 

She went and prayed in the cathedral, but it 
seemed cold, and desolate, and empty; even 
the storied windows seemed dark. 

“ Perhaps he is gone out of the city,” she 
thought; and a terror fell on her that frightened 
her, it was so unlike any fear that she had 
ever known — even the fear when she had seen 
death on old Antoine’s face had been nothing 
like this. 

Going home through the streets, she passed 
the cafe of the Trois Freres that looks out on 
the trees of the park, and that has flowers in 
its balconies, and pleasant windows that stand 
open to let the sounds of the soldiers’ music 
enter. She saw him in one of the windows. 
There were amber and scarlet and black ; silks 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 127 


and satins and velvets. There was a fan painted 
and jewelled. There were women’s faces. 



There was a heap of purple fruit and glittering 
sweetmeats. He laughed there. His beautiful 
Murillo head was dark against the white and 
gold within. 

Bebee looked up, — paused a second, — then 
went onward, with a thorn in her heart. 

He had not seen her. 

It is natural, of course — he has his world 
— he does not think often of me — there is no 
reason why he should be as good as he is,” she 
said to herself as she went slowly over the 
stones. 

She had the dog’s soul — only she did not 
know it. 

But the tears fell down her cheeks, as she 
walked. 

It looked so bright in there, so gay, with the 
sound of the music coming in through the trees, 
and those women, — she had seen such women 
before ; sometimes in the winter nights, going 


128 


bAbAe, 


home from the lace work, she had stopped at 
the doors of the palaces, or of the opera house, 
when the carriages were setting down their bril- 
liant burdens ; and sometimes on the great feast 
days she had seen the people of the court going 
out to some gala at the theatre, or some great 
review of troops, or some ceremonial of foreign 
sovereigns; but she had never thought about 
them before ; she had never wondered whether 
velvet was better to wear than woollen serge, or 
diamonds lighter on the head than a little cap 
of linen. 

But now — 

Those women seemed to her so dazzling, so 
wondrously, so superhum^ly beautiful ; they 
seemed like some of those new dahlia flowers, 
rose and purple and gold, that outblazed the 
sun on the south border of her little garden, 
and blanched all the soft color out of the 
homely roses, and pimpernels, and sweet- 
williams, and double-stocks, that had bloomed 
there ever since the days of Waterloo. 

But the dahlias had no scent; and Bebee 
wondered if these women had any heart in 
them, — they looked all laughter, and glitter, 
and vanity. To. the child, whose dreams of 
womanhood were evolved from the face of 
the Mary of the Assumption, of the Susannah 
of Mieris, and of that Angel in the blue coif 
whose face has a light as of the sun. — to her 
who had dreamed her way into vague percep- 
tions of her own sex’s maidenhood and mater- 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


29 


nity by help of those great pictures which had 
been before her sight from infancy, there was 
some taint, some artifice, some want, some 
harshness in these .jewelled women ; she could 
not have reasoned about it, but she felt it, as 
she felt that the grand dahlias missed a flower’s 
divinity, being scentless. 

She was a little bit of wild thyme herself; 
hardy, fragrant, clean, tender, flowering by the 
wayside, full of honey, though only nourished 
on the turf and the stones, these gaudy, bril- 
liant, ruby-bright, scarlet-mantled dahlias hurt 
her with a dim sense of pain and shame. 

Fasting, next day at sunrise she confessed to 
Father Francis: — 

“ I saw beautiful rich women, and I envied 
them ; and I could not pray to Mary last night 
for thinking of them, for I hated them so much.” 

But she did not say, — 

“ I hated them because they were with him.” 

Out of the purest little soul. Love entering 
drives forth Candor. 

“That is not like you at all, Bebee,” said the 
good old man, as she knelt at his feet on the 
bricks of his little bare study, where all the 
books he ever spelt out were treatises on the 
art of bee-keeping. 

“My dear, you never were covetous at all, 
nor did you ever seem to care for the things of 
the world. I wish Jehan had not given you 
those silver buckles ; I think they have set your 
little soul on vanities.” 


130 




“ It is not the buckles ; I am not covetous,’* 
said Bebee ; and then her face grew warm. 
She did not know why, and she did not hear 
the rest of Father Francis’s admonitions. 


OR TWO LITTLE WO ODE AT SHOES. 


131 


CHAPTER XIII. 

B ut the next noon-time brought him to the 
market stall, and the next also, and so 
the summer days slipped away, and Bebee was 
quite happy if she saw him in the morning 
time, to give him a fresh rose, or at evening by 
the gates, or under the beech-trees, when he 
brought her a new book, and sauntered awhile 
up the green lane beside her. 

An innocent, unconscious love like Bebee’s 
wants so little food to make it all content. 
Such mere trifles are beautiful and sweet to it. 
Such slender stray gleams of light suffice to 
make a broad, bright golden noon of perfect 
joy around it. 

All the delirium, and fever, and desire, and 
despair, that are in maturer passion, are far away 
from it : far as is the flash of the meteor across 
sultry skies from the blue forget-me-not down 
in the brown meadow brook. 

It was very wonderful to Bebee that he, this 
stranger from Rubes’ fairyland, could come at 
all to keep pace with her little clattering 
wooden shoes over the dust and the grass in the 
dim twilight time. The days went by in a 
trance of sweet amaze, and she kept count of 


132 


bAb^e, 


the hours no more by the cuckoo-clock of the 
mill-house, or the deep chimes of the Brussels 
belfries ; but only by such moments as brought 
her a word from his lips, or even a glimpse of 
him from afar, across the crowded square. 

She sat up half the nights reading the books 
he gave her, studying the long cruel poly- 
syllables, and spelling slowly through the 
phrases that seemed to her so cramped and 
tangled, and which yet were a pleasure to un- 
ravel for sake of the thought they held. 

For Bebee, ignorant little simple soul that 
she was, had a mind in her that was eager, 
observant, quick to acquire, skilful to retain ; and 
it would happen in certain times that Flamen, 
speaking to her of the things which he gave to 
her to read, would think to himself that this 
child had more wisdom than was often to be 
found in schools. 

Meanwhile he pondered various studies in 
various stages of a Gretchen, and made love to 
Bebee — made love at least by his eyes and by 
his voice, not hurrying his pleasant task, but 
hovering about her softly, and mindful not to 
scare her, as a man will gently lower his hand 
over a poised butterfly that he seeks to kill, and 
which one single movement, a thought too 
quick, may scare away to safety. 

Bebee knew where he lived in the street of 
Mary of Burgundy; in an old palace that be- 
longed to a great Flemish noble, who never 
dwelt there himself ; but to ask anything about 


OR 7 irO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


133 


him — why he was there? what his rank was? 
why he stayed in the city at ail? — was a sort of 
treason that never entered her thoughts. 

Psyche, if she had been as simple and loyal 
as Bebee was, would never have lighted her 
own candle ; but even Psyche would not have 
borrowed any one else’s lamp to lighten the 
love darkness. 

To Bebee he was sacred, unapproachable, un- 
questionable ; he was a wonderful, perfect hap- 
piness that had fallen into her life ; he was a 
gift of God, as* the sun was. 

She took his going and Coming as she took 
that of the sun, never dreaming of reproaching 
his absence, never dreaming of asking if in the 
empty night he shone on any other worlds than 
hers. 

It was hardly so much a faith with her as an 
instinct ; faith must reason ere it know itself to 
be faith. Bebee never reasoned any more than 
her roses did. 

The good folks in the market place watched 
her a little anxiously ; they thought ill of that 
little moss-rose that every day found its way to 
one wearer only ; but after all they did not see 
much, and the neighbors nothing at all. For 
he never went home to her, nor with her, and 
most of the time that he spent with Bebee was 
in the quiet evening shadows, as she went up 
with her empty basket through the deserted 
country roads. 

Bebee was all day long in the city, indeed, as 


134 




other girls were, but with her it had always 
been different. Antoine had always been with 
her up to the day of his death ; and after his 
death she had sat in the same place, surrounded 
by the people she had known from infancy, and 
an insult to her would have been answered by 
a stroke from the cobbler’s strap or from the 
tinker’s hammer. There was one girl only who 
ever tried to do her any harm — a good-looking 
stout wench, who stood at the corner of the 
Montagne de la Cour with a stall of fruit in the 



summer time, and in winter time drove a milk 
cart over the snow. This girl would get at her 
sometimes, and talk of the students, and tcil her 
how good it was to get out of the town c n a 
holiday, and go to any one of the villages v here 
there was Kermesse and dance, and drink the 
little blue wine, and have trinkets bought for 
one, and come home in the moonlight in a 
char-a-banc, with the horns sounding, and the 
lads singing, and the ribbons flying from the 
old horse’s ears. 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


135 


“ She is such a little close sly thing ! ” thought 
the fruit girl, sulkily. To vice, innocence must 
always seem only a superior kind of chicanery. 

‘VWe dance almost every evening, the chil- 
dren^ and I,” Bebee had answered when urged 
fifty times by this girl to go to fairs, and balls 
at the wine shops. “ That does just as well. 
And I have seen Kermesse once at Malines — 
it was beautiful. I went with Mere Dax, but 
it cost a great deal I know, though she did not 
let me pay.” 

“ You little fool ! ” the fruit girl would say, 
and grin, and eat a pear. 

But the good honest old women who sat 
about in the Grande Place, hearing, had always 
taken the fruit girl to task, when they got her 
by herself. 

“ Leave the child alone, you mischievous 
one,” said they. “Be content with being base 
yourself. Look you, Lisette ; she is not one 
like you to make eyes at the law students, and 
pester the painter lads for a day’s outing. Let 
her be, or we will tell your mother how you 
leave the fruit for the gutter children to pick 
and thieve, while you are stealing up the stairs 
into that young French fellow’s chamber. Oh, 
oh ! a fine beating you will get when she 
knows ! ” 

Lisette’s mother was a fierce and strong old 
Brabantoise, who exacted heavy reckoning with 
her daughter for every single plum and peach 
that she sent out of her dark sweet-smelling 


136 




fruit shop to be sunned in the streets, and under 
the students’ love-glances. 

So the girl took heed, and left Bebee alone. 

“ What should I want her to come with us 
for?” she reasoned with herself. “She is 
twice as pretty as I am; Jules might take to 
her instead — who knows? ” 

So that she was at once savage and yet 
triumphant when she saw, as she thought, 
Bebee drifting down the high flood of tempta- 
tion. 

“ Oh, oh, you dainty one ! ” she cried one day to 
her. “ So you would not take the nuts and mul- 
berries that do for us common folk, because you 
had a mind for a fine pine out of the hothouses ! 
That was all, was it? Eh, well; I do not be- 
grudge you. Only take care; remember, the 
nuts and mulberries last through summer and 
autumn, and there are heaps of them on every 
fair-stall and street corner; but the pine, that 
is eaten in a day, one springtime, and its like 
does not grow in the hedges. You will have 
your mouth full of sugar an hour, — and then, 
eh ! — you will go famished all the year.” 

“I do not understand,” said Bebee, looking 
up, with her thoughts far away, and scarcely 
hearing the words spoken to her. 

“ Oh, pretty little fool ! you understand well 
enough,” said Lisette, grinning, as she rubbed 
up a melon. “Does he give you fine things? 
You might let me see.” 

“ No one gives me anything.” 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


137 


“Chut! you want me to believe that. Why 
Jules is only a lad, and his father is a silk 
mercer, and only gives him a hundred francs a 
month, but Jules buys me all I want — somehow 
— or do you think I would take the trouble to 
set my cap straight when he goes by? He 



gave me these ear-rings, look. I wish you 
would let me see what you get.” 

But Bebee had gone away — unheeding — 
dreaming of Juliet and of Jeanne d’Arc, of 
whom he had told her tales. 


138 




He made sketches of her sometimes, but 
seldom pleased himself. 

It was not so easy as he had imagined that 
it would prove to portray this little flower-like 
face, with the clear eyes and the child’s open 
brow. He who had painted Phryne so long 
and faithfully had got a taint on his brush — 
he could not paint this pure, bright, rosy 
dawn — he who had always painted the glare 
of midnight gas on rouge or rags. Yet he felt 
that if he could transfer to canvas the light that 
was on Bebee’s face he would get what Scheffer 
had missed. For a time it eluded him. You 
shall paint a gold and glistening brocade, or a 
fan of peacock’s feathers, to perfection, and 
yet, perhaps, the dewy whiteness of the humble 
little field daisy shall baffle and escape you. 

He felt, too, that he must catch her expres- 
sion flying as he would do the flash of a swal- 
low’s wing across a blue sky; he knew that 
Bebee, forced to studied attitudes in an atelier, 
would be no longer the ideal that he wanted. 

More than once he came and filled in more 
fully his various designs in the little hut garden, 
among the sweet gray lavender and the golden 
disks of the sunflowers ; and more than once 
Bebee was missed from her place in the front of 
the Broodhuis. 

The Varnhart children would gather now and 
then open-mouthed at the wicket, and Mere 
Krebs would shake her head as she went by on 
her sheepskin saddle, and mutter that the 


OR TWO LITTLE WOOD EAT SHOES. 


child’s head would be turned by vanity; and 
old Jehan would lean on his stick and peer 
through the sweetbrier, and wonder stupidly 
if this strange man who could make Bebee’s 
face beam over again upon that panel of wood 
could not give him back his dead daughter who 
had been pushed away under the black earth so 
long, long before, when the red mill had been 
brave and new, the red mill that the boys and 
girls called old. 

But except these, no one noticed much. 

Painters were no rare sights in Brabant. 

The people were used to see them coming 
and going, making pictures of mud and stones, 
and ducks and sheep, and of all common and silly 
things. 

“ What does he pay you,Bebee? ” they used 
to ask, with the shrewd Flemish thought after 
the main chance. 

“ Nothing,” Bebee would answer, with a quick 
color in her face ; and they would reply in con- 
temptuous reproof, “ Careless little fool ; you 
should make enough to buy you wood all 
winter. When the man from Ghent painted 
Trine and her cow, he gave her a whole gold 
bit for standing still so long in the clover. The 
Krebs would be sure to lend you her cow, if it 
be the cow that makes the difference.” 

Bebee was silent, weeding her carnation 
bed; — what could she tell them that they 
would understand? 

She seemed so far away from them all — 


140 


b^:bAe, 


those good friends of her childhood — now 
that this wonderful new world of his giving 
had opened to her sight. 

She lived in a dream. 

Whether she sat in the market place taking 
copper coins, or in the moonlight with a book 
on her knees, it was all the same. Her feet 
ran, her tongue spoke, her hands worked ; she 
did not neglect her goat or her garden, she did 
not forsake her house labor or her good deeds 
to old Annemie ; but all the while she only- 
heard one vo'ce, she only felt one touch, she 
only saw one face. 

Here and there — one in a million — there is 
a female thing that can love like this, once and 
forever. 

Such an one is dedicated, birth upwards, to 
the Mater Dolorosa. 

He had something nearer akin to affection for 
her than he had ever had in his life for anything, 
but he was never in love with her — no more in 
love with her than with the moss-rosebuds that 
she fastened in his breast. Yet he played with 
her, because she was such a little, soft, tempting 
female thing ; and because, to see her face flush, 
and her heart heave, to feel her fresh feelings 
stir into life, and to watch her changes from 
shyness to confidence, and from frankness again 
into fear, was a natural pastime in the lazy golden 
weather. 

That he spared her as far as he did, — when 
after all she would have married Jeannot any- 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 141 

how, — and that he sketched her face in the 
open air, and never entered her hut and never 
beguiled her to his own old palace in the city, 
was a new virtue in himself for which he hardly 
knew whether to feel respect or ridicule ; any- 
way, it seemed virtue to him. 

So long as he did not seduce the body, it 
seemed to him that it could never matter how 
he slew the soul, — the little, honest, happy, 
pure, frank soul, that amidst its poverty and 
hardships was like a robin’s song to the winter 
sun. 

“ Hoot, toot, pretty innocent, so you are no 
better than the rest of us,” hissed her enemy, 
Lisette, the fruit girl, against her as she went 
by the stall one evening as the sun set. “ Prut ! 
so it was no such purity after all that made you 
never look at the student lads and the soldiers, 
eh? You were so dainty of taste, you must 
needs pick and choose, and. Lord’s sake, after 
all your coyness, to drop at a beckoning finger 
as one may say — pong ! — in a minute, like 
an apple over-ripe ! Oh he, you sly one ! ” 

Bebee flushed red, in a sort of instinct of 
offence ; not sure what her fault was, but 
vaguely stung by the brutal words. 

Bebee walked homeward by him, with her 
empty baskets : looked at him with grave won- 
dering eyes. 

“ What did she mean? I do not understand. 
I must have done some wrong — or she thinks 
so. Do you know?” 


142 

Flamen laughed, and answered her eva- 
sively, — 

“ You have done her the wrong of a fair skin 
when hers is brown, and a little foot while hers 
is as big as a trooper’s ; there is no greater sin, 
Bebee, possible in woman to woman.” 

“ Hold your peace, you shrill jade,” he 
added, in anger to the fruiterer, flinging at her 
a crown piece, that the girl caught, and bit 
with her teeth with a chuckle. “ Do not heed 
her, Bebee. She is a coarse-tongued brute, 
and is jealous, no doubt.” 

“Jealous? — of what?” 

The word had no meaning to Bebee. 

“ That I am not a student or a soldier, as 
her lovers are.” 

As her lovers were ! Bebee felt her face 
burn again. Was he her lover then? The 
child’s innocent body and soul thrilled with a 
hot, sweet delight and fear commingled. 

Bebee was not quite satisfied until she had 
knelt down that night and asked the Master 
ol all poor maidens to see if there were any 
wickedness in her heart, hidden there like a bee 
in a rose, and if there were to take it out and 
make her worthier of this wonderful new hap- 
piness in her life. 


0/i TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


143 


CHAPTER XIV. 

T he next day, waking with a radiant little 
soul as a bird in a forest wakes in summer 
Bebee was all alone in the lane by the swans’ 
water. In the gray of the dawn all the good 
folk except herself and lame old Jehan had 
tramped off to a pilgrimage, Liege way, which 
the bishop of the city had enjoined on all the 
faithful as a sacred duty. 

Bebee doing her work, singing, thinking how 
good God was, and dreaming over a thousand 
fancies of the wonderful stories he had told her, 
and of the exquisite delight that would lie for 
her in watching for him all through the shining 
hours, Bebee felt her little heart leap like a 
squirrel as the voice that was the music of 
heaven to her called through the stillness, — 

“ Good day, pretty one ! you are as early as 
the lark, Bebee. I go to Mayence, so I thought 
I would look at you one moment as I pass.” 

Bebee ran down through the wet grass in a 
tumult of joy. She had never seen him so early 
in the day — never so early as this, when no- 
body was up and^ stirring except birds and 
beasts and peasant folk. 

She did not know how pretty she looked her- 




M4 

self; like a rain-washed wild rose; her feet 
gleaming with dew, her cheeks warm with 
health and joy ; her sunny clustering hair free 
from the white cap and tumbling a little about 
her throat, because she had been stooping over 
the carnations. 

Flamen loosed the wicket latch, and thought 
there might be better ways of spending the day 
than in the gray shadows of old Mechlin. 

“ Will you give me a draught of water? ” he 
asked her as he crossed the garden. 

“ I will give you breakfast,” said Bebee, 
happy as a bird. She felt no shame for the 
smallness of her home ; no confusion at the 
poverty of her little place ; such embarrass- 
ments are born of self-consciousness, and Bebee 
had no more self-consciousness than her own 
sweet, gray lavender-bush blowing against the 
door. 

The lavender-bush has no splendor like the 
roses, has no colors like the hollyhocks ; it is a 
simple, plain, gray thing that the bees love and 
that the cottagers cherish, and that keeps the 
moth from the homespun linen, and that goes 
with the dead to their graves. 

It has many virtues and infinite sweetness, 
but it does not know it or think of it; and if 
the village girls ever tell it so, it fancies they 
only praise it out of kindness as they put its 
slender fragrant spears away in their warm 
bosoms. Bebee was like her lavender, and now 
that this beautiful Purple Emperor butterfly 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 145 


came from the golden sunbeams to find pleasure 
for a second in her freshness, she was only very- 
grateful, as the lavender-bush was to the village 
girls. 

“ I will give you your breakfast,” said Be'oee, 
flushing rosily with pleasure, and putting away 
the ivy coils that he might enter. 

“ I have very little, you know,” she added, 
wistfully. “ Only goat’s milk and bread ; but 
if that will do — and there is some honey — 
and if you would eat a salad, I would cut one 
fresh.” 

He did enter, and glanced round him with a 
curious pity and wonder both in one. 

It was such a little, small, square place ; and 
its floor was of beaten clay; and its unceiled 
roof he could have touched ; and its absolute 
poverty was so plain, — and yet the child looked 
so happy in it, and was so like a flower, and was 
so dainty and fresh, and even so full of grace. 

She stood and looked at him with frank and 
grateful eyes ; she could hardly believe that he 
was here; he, the stranger of Rubes’ land, in 
her own little rush-covered home. 

But she was not embarrassed by it ; she was 
glad and proud. 

There is a dignity of peasants as well as of 
kings, — the dignity that comes from all absence 
of effort, all freedom from pretence. Bebee had 
this, and she had more still than this: she had 
the absolute simplicity of childhood with her 
still. 


146 bj^bAe, 

Some women have it still when they are four- 
score. 

She could have looked at him forever, she 
was so happy ; she cared nothing now for those 
dazzling dahlias — he had left them ; he was 
actually here — here in her own, little dear 
home, with the cocks looking in at the thresh- 
old, and the sweet-peas nodding at the lattice, 
and the starling crying, “ Bonjour ! Bonjour ! ” 

“ You are tired, I am sure you must be tired,” 
she said, pulling her little bed forward for him 
to sit on, for there were only two wooden stools 
in the hut, and no chair at all. 

Then she took his sketching-easel and brushes 
from his hand, and would have kneeled and 
taken the dust off his boots if he would have 
let her ; and went hither and thither gladly and 
lightly, bringing him a wooden bowl of milk 
and the rest of the slender fare, and cutting as 
quick as thought fresh cresses and lettuce from 
her garden, and bringing him, as the crown of 
all. Father Francis’s honey-comb on vine-leaves, 
with some pretty sprays of box and mignonette 
scattered about it — doing all this with a swift, 
sweet grace -that robbed the labor of all look of 
servitude, and looking at him ever and again 
with a smile that said as clearly as any words, 
“ I cannot do much, but what I do, I do with 
all my heart.” 

There was something in the sight of her going 
and coming in those simple household errands, 
across the sunlit floor, that moved him as some 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


H7 


mountain air sung on an alp by a girl driving 
her cows to pasture may move a listener who 
indifferent has heard the swell of the organ of 
La Hague, or the recitative of a great singer in 
San Carlo. 

The gray lavender blowing at the house door 
has its charm for those who are tired of the ca- 
mellias that float in the porcelain bowls of mid- 
night suppers. 

This man was not good. He was idle and 
vain, and amorous and cold, and had been 
spoiled by the world in which he had passed 
his days ; but he had the temper of an artist ; 
he had something, too, of a poet’s fancy ; he 
was vaguely touched and won by this simple 
soul that looked at him out of Bebee’s eyes with 
some look that in all its simplicity had a divine 
gleam in it that made him half ashamed. 

He had known women by the thousand, good 
women and bad ; women whom he had dealt 
ill with and women who had dealt ill with him ; 
but this he had not known — this frank, fearless, 
tender, gay, grave, innocent, industrious little 
life, helping itself, feeding itself, defending itself, 
working for itself and for others, and vaguely 
seeking all the while some unseen light, some 
unknown god, with a blind faith so infinitely 
ignorant and yet so infinitely pathetic. 

“ All the people are gone on a pilgrimage,” 
she explained to him when he asked her why 
her village was so silent this bright morning. 
“ They are gone to pray for a fine harvest, and 


148 


BAs&Ey 


then each one prays for some other little thing 
that she wants herself as well — it costs seven 
francs apiece. They take their food with them ; 
they go and laugh and eat in the fields. I think 
it is nonsense. One can say one’s prayers just 
as well here. Mere Krebs thinks so too, but 
then she says, ‘If I do not go, it will look ill ; 
people will say I am irreligious; and as we 
make so much by flour, God would think it 
odd for me to be absent; and, besides, it is 
only seven francs there and back; and if it 
does please Heaven, that is cheap, you know. 



One will get it over and over again in Paradise.’ 
That is what Mere Krebs says. But, for me, I 
think it is nonsense. It cannot please God to 
go by train and eat galette and waste a whole 
day in getting dusty. 

“When I give the Virgin my cactus flower, I 
do give up a thing I love, and I let it wither on 
her altar instead of pleasing me in bloom here 
all the week, and then, of course; she sees that 
I have done it out of gratitude. But that is 
different : that I am sorry to do, and yet I am 
glad to do it out of love. Do you not know?” 


OR 7'WO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


149 


“ Yes, I know very well. But is the Virgin 
all that you love like this? ” 

“ No ; there is the garden, and there is An- 
toine — he is dead, I know. But I think that 
we should love the dead all the better, not the 
less, because they cannot speak or say that they 
are angry; and perhaps one pains them very 
much when one neglects them, and if they are 
ever so sad, they cannot rise and rebuke one — 
that is why I would rather forget the flowers for 
the Church than I would the flowers for his 
grave, because God can punish me, of course, 
if he like, but Antoine never can — any more — 
now.” 

“ You are logical in your sentiment, my dear,” 
said Flamen, who was more moved than he cared 
to feel. “The union is a rare one in your sex. 
Who taught you to reason?” 

“ No one. And I do not know what to be 
logical means. Is it that you laugh at me ? ” 
“No. I do not laugh. And your pilgrims — 
they are gone for all day? ” 

“ Yes. They are gone to the Sacred Heart 
at St. Marie en Bois. It is on the way to Liege. 
They will come back at nightfall. And some 
of them will be sure to have drunk too much, 
and the children will get so cross. Prosper Bar, 
who is a Calvinist, always says, ‘ Do not mix up 
prayer and play ; you would not cut a gherkin 
in your honey ’ ; but I do not know why he 
called prayer a gherkin, because it is sweet 
enough — sweeter than anything, I think. When 




I pray to the Virgin to let me see you next day, 
I go to bed quite happy, because she will do it, 
I know, if it will be good for me.” 

“ But if it were not good for you, Bebee ? 
Would you cease to wish it then? ” 

He rose as he spoke, and went across the 
floor and drew away her hand that was parting 
the flax, and took it in his own and stroked it, 
indulgently and carelessly, as a man may stroke 
the soft fur of a young cat. 

Leaning against the little lattice and looking 
down on her with musing eyes, half smiling, half 
serious, half amorous, half sad, Bebee looked 
up with a sudden and delicious terror that ran 
through her as the charm of the snake’s gaze 
runs through the bewildered bird. 

“ Would you cease to wish it if it were not 
good? ” he asked again. 

Bebee’s face grew pale and troubled. She 
left her hand in his because she did not think 
any shame of his taking it. But the question 
suddenly flung the perplexity and darkness of 
doubt into the clearness of her pure child’s con- 
science. All hex ways had been straight and 
sunlit before her. 

She had never had a divided duty. 

The religion and the pleasure of her simple 
little life had always gone hand-in-hand, greet- 
ing one another, and never for an instant in con- 
flict. In any hesitation of her own she had 
always gone to Father Francis, and he had dis- 
entangled the web for her and made all plain. 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 15 1 

But here was a difficulty in which she could 
never go to Father Francis. 

Right and wrong, duty and desire, were for 
the first time arrayed before her in their ghastly 
and unending warfare. 

It frightened her with a certain breathless 
sense of peril — the peril of a time when in lieu of 
that gentle Mother of Roses whom she kneeled 
to among the flowers, she would only see a dusky 
shadow looming between her and the beauty of 
life and the light of the sun. 

What he said was quite vague to her. She 
attached no definite danger to his words. She 
only thought — to see him was so great a joy — 
if Mary forbade it, would she not take it if she 
could notwithstanding, always, always, always? 

He kept her hand in his, and watched with 
contentment the changing play of the shade and 
sorrow, the fear and fascination, on her face. 

“You do not know, Bebee ? " he said at 
length, knowing well himself; so much better 
than ever she knew. “ Well, dear, that is not 
flattering to me. But it is natural. The good 
Virgin of course gives you all you have, food, 
and clothes, and your garden, and your pretty 
plump chickens ; and I am only a stranger. 
You could not offend her for me ; that is not 
likely.” 

The child was cut to the heart by the sadness 
and humility of words of whose studied artifice 
she had no suspicion. 

She thought that she seemed to him ungrate- 


152 


££b£e, 


ful and selfish, and yet all the mooring-ropes 
that held her little boat of life to the harbor of 
its simple religion seemed cut away, and she 
seemed drifting helpless and rudderless upon an 
unknown sea. 

“I never did do wrong — that I know,” she 
said, timidly, and lifted her eyes to his with an 
unconscious appeal in them. 

But — I do not see why it should be wrong 
to speak with you. You are good, and you 
lend me beautiful things out of other men’s 
minds that will make me less ignorant : Our 
Lady could not be angry with that — she must 
like it.” 

“Our Lady? — oh, poor little simpleton ! — 
where will her reign be when Ignorance has 
once been cut down root and branch?” he 
thought to himself; but he only answered, — 

“But whether she like it or not, Bebee? — 
you beg the question, my dear ; you are — you 
are not so frank as usual — think, and tell me 
honestly? ” 

He knew quite well, but it amused him to see 
the perplexed trouble that this, the first divided 
duty of her short years, brought with it. 

Bebee looked at him, and loosened her hand 
from his, and sat quite still. Her lips had a 
little quiver in them. 

“ I think,” she said at last, “ I think — if it be 
wrong, still I will wish it — yes. Only I will 
not tell myself it is right. I will just say to Our 
Lady, ‘ I am wicked, perhaps, but I cannot help 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


153 


it.’ So, I will not deceive her at all ; and per- 
haps in time she may forgive. But I think you 
only say it to try me. It cannot, I am sure, be 
wrong — any more than it is to talk to Jeannot 
or to Bac.” 

He had driven her into the subtleties of doubt, 
but the honest little soul in her found a way out, 
as a flower in a cellar finds its way through the 
stones to light. 

He plucked the ivy leaves and threw them at 
the chickens on the bricks without, with a cer- 
tain impatience in the action. The simplicity 
and the directness of the answer disarmed him ; 
he was almost ashamed to use against her the 
weapons of his habitual warfare. It was like a 
maitre d’armes fencing with bare steel against a 
little naked child armed with a blest palm-sheaf. 

When she had thus brought him all she had, 
and he to please her had sat down to the sim- 
ple food, she gathered a spray of roses and set 
it in a pot beside him, then left him and went 
and stood at a little distance, waiting, with her 
hands lightly crossed on her chest, to see if 
there were anything that he might want. 

He ate and drank well to please her, looking 
at her often as he did so. 

“ I break your bread, Bebee,” he said, with 
a tone that seemed strange to her, — “I break 
your bread. I must keep Arab faith with 
you.” 

“ What is that? ” 

“ I mean — I must never betray you.” 


154 


b^,bAe, 


“ Betray me How could you ? ” 

“Well — hurt you in any way.” 

“ Ah, I am sure you would never do that.” 

He was silent, and looked at the spray of 
roses. 

“ Sit down and spin,” he said impatiently. 
“ I am ashamed to see you stand there, and a 
woman never looks so well as when she spins. 
Sit down, and I will eat the good things you 
have brought me. But I cannot if you stand 
and look.” 

“ I beg your pardon, I did not know,” she 
said, ashamed lest she should have seemed 
rude to him ; and she drew out her wheel under 
the light of the lattice, and sat down to it, and 
began to disentangle the threads. 

It was a pretty picture — the low, square 
casement; the frame of ivy, the pink and white 
of the climbing sweet-peas ; the girl’s head ; 
the cool, wet leaves ; the old wooden spinning- 
wheel, that purred like a sleepy cat. 

“I want to paint you as Gretchen, only it 
will be a shame,” he said. 

“Who is Gretchen?” 

“ You shall read of her by-and-by. And 
you live here all by yourself? ” 

“Since Antoine died — yes.” 

“ And are never dull? ” 

“I have no time, and I do not think I would 
be if I had time — there is so much to think of, 
and one never can understand.” 

“ But you must be very brave and laborious 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


155 



to do all your work yourself. Is it possible a 
child like you can spin, and wash, and bake, 
and garden, and do everything?” 


“ Oh, many do more than I. Babette’s 
eldest daughter is only twelve, and she does 
much more, because she has all the children to 
look after ; and they are very, very poor ; they 
often have nothing but a stew of nettles and 
perhaps a few snails, days together.” 


56 


b^bAe, 


“ That is lean, bare, ugly, gruesome poverty ; 
there is plenty of that everywhere. But you, 
Bebee — you are an idyll.” 

Bebee looked across the hut and smiled, and 
broke her thread. She did not know what he 
meant, but if she were anything that pleased 
him, it was well. 

“ Who were those beautiful women ? ” she said 
suddenly, the color mounting into her cheeks. 

“What women, my dear? ” 

“Those I saw at the window with you, the 
other night — they had jewels.” 

“ Oh ! — women, tiresome enough. If I had 
seen you, I would have dropped you some fruit. 
Poor little Bebee ! Did you go by, and I never 
knew? ” 

“ You were laughing — ” 

“Was I?” 

“Yes, and they were beautiful.” 

“ In their own eyes; not in mine.” 

“ No? ” 

She stopped her spinning and gazed at him 
with wistful, wondering eyes. Could it be that 
they were not beautiful to him? those deep red, 
glowing, sun-basked dahlia flowers? 

“ Do you know,” she said very softly, with a 
flush of penitence that came and went, “when I 
saw them, I hated them ; I confessed it to Father 
Francis next day. You seemed so content with 
them, and they looked so gay and glad there — 
and then the jewels ! Somehow, I seemed to 
myself such a little thing, and so ugly and mean. 
And yet, do you know — ” 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


“ And yet — well? ” 

“They did not look to me good — those 
women,” said Bebee, thoughtfully, looking 
across at him in deprecation of his possible 
anger. “ They were great people, I suppose, 
and they appeared very happy ; but though I 
seemed nothing to myself after them, still I 
think I would not change.” 

“You are wise without books, Bebee.” 

“ Oh, no, I am not wise at all. I only feel. 
And give me books ; oh, pray, give me books ! 
You do not know; I will learn so fast; and I 
will not neglect anything, that I promise. The 
neighbors and Jeannot say that I shall let the 
flowers die, and the hut get dirty, and never 
spin or prick Annemie’s patterns ; but that is 
untrue. I will do all, just as I have done, and 
more too, if only you will give me things to 
read, for I do think when one is happy, one 
ought to work more — not less.” 

“ But will these books make you happy? If 
you ask me the truth, I must tell you — no. 
You are happy as you are, because you know 
nothing else than your own little life ; for igno- 
rance is happiness, Bebee, let sages, ancient 
and modern, say what they will. But when you 
know a little, you will want to know more ; 
and when you know much, you will want to see 
much also, and then — and then — the thing 
will grow — you will be no longer content. 
That is, you will be unhappy.” 

Bebee watched him with wistful eyes. 


158 


B&B&E, 


“ Perhaps that it is true. No doubt it is true, 
if you say it. But you know all the world 
seems full of voices that I hear, but that I can- 
not understand ; it is with me as I should think 
it is with people who go to foreign countries 
and do not know the tongue that is spoken 
when they land; and it makes me unhappy, 
because I cannot comprehend, and so the books 
will not make me more so, but less. And as 
for being content — when I thought vou were 
gone away out of the city, last night, I thought 
I would never be able to pray any more, because 
I hated myself, and I almost hated the angels, 
and I told Mary that she was cruel, and she 
turned her face from me — as it seemed, for- 
ever.” 

She spoke quite quietly and simply, spinning 
as she spoke, and looking across at him with 
earnest eyes, that begged him to believe her. 
She was saying the pure truth, but she did not 
know the force or the meaning of that truth. 

He listened with a smile ; it was not new to 
him ; he knew her heart much better than she 
knew it herself, but there was an unconscious- 
ness, and yet a strength, in the words that 
touched him though. 

He threw the leaves away, irritably, and told 
her to leave off her spinning. 

“ Some day I shall paint you with that wheel 
as I painted the Broodhuis. Will you let me, 
Bebee? ” 

“ Yes.” 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SBOES. 


159 


She answered him as she would have answered 
if he had told her to go on pilgrimage from one 
end of the Low Countries to the other. 

“ What were you going to do to-day?” 

“ I am going into the market with the flowers ; 
I go every day.” 

“ How much will you make?” 

“ Two or three francs, if I am lucky.” 

“And do you never have a holiday?” 

“ Oh, yes ; but not often, you know, because 
it is on the fSte days that the people want the 
most flowers.” 

“ But in the winter? ” 

“ Then I work at the lace.” 

“ Do you never go into the woods?” 

“ I have been once or twice ; but it loses a 
whole day.” 

“You are afraid of not earning?” 

“Yes. Because I am afraid of owing people 
anything.” 

“ Well, give up this one day, and we will 
make holiday. The people are out; they will 
not know. Come into the forest, and we will 
dine at a cafe in the woods ; and we will be as 
poetic as you like, and I will tell you a tale of 
one called Rosalind, who pranked herself in 
boy’s attire, all for love, in the Ardennes country 
yonder. Come, it is the very day for the forest; 
it will make me a lad again at Meudon, when 
the lilacs were in bloom. Poor Paris ! Come.” 

“ Do you mean it ?” 

The color was bright in her face, her heart 


i6o 


bAbAe, 


was dancing, her little feet felt themselves al- 
ready on the fresh green turf. 

She had no thought that there could be any 
harm in it. She would have gone with Jeannot 
or old Bac. 

“ Of course I mean it. Come. I was going 
to Mayence to see the Magi and Van Dyck’s 
Christ. We will go to Soignies instead, and 
study green leaves. I will paint your face by 
sunlight. It is the best way to paint you. You 
belong to the open air. So should Gretchen ; 
or how else should she have the blue sky in 
her eyes ? ” 

“ But I have only wooden shoes ! ” 

Her face was scarlet as she glanced at her 
feet; he who had wanted to give her the silk 
stockings — how would he like to be seen walk- 
ing abroad with those two clumsy, clattering, 
work-a-day, little sabots? 

“ Never mind. My dear, in my time I have 
had enough of satin shoes and of silver gilt 
heels ; they click-clack as loud as yours, and 
cost much more to those who walk with them, 
not to mention that they will seldom deign to 
walk at all. Your wooden shoes are pictur- 
esque. Paganini made a violin out of a wooden 
shoe. Who knows what music may lurk in 
yours, only you have never heard it. Perhaps 
I have. It was Bac who gave you the red 
shoes that was the barbarian, not I. Come.” 

“You really mean it? ” 

“ Come.” 


OR TH/0 LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. i6i 

“ But they will miss me at market” 

“They will think you are gone on the pil- 
grimage : you need never tell them you have not.” 

“ But if they ask me? ” 

“ Does it never happen that you say any 
other thing than the truth? ” 

“ Any other thing than the truth ! Of 
course not. People take for granted that one 
tells truth ; it- would be very base to cheat 
them. Do you really mean that I may come? 
— in the forest ! — and you will tell me stories 
like those you give me to read ? ” 

“ I will tell you a better story. Lock your 
hut, Bebee, and come.” 

“ And to think you are not ashamed ! ” 

“Ashamed?” 

“Yes, because of my wooden shoes.” 

Was it possible? Bebee thought, as she ran 
out into the garden and locked the door be- 
hind her, and pushed the key under the water- 
butt as usual, being quite content with that 
prudent precaution against robbers which had 
served Antoine all his days. Was it possible, 
this wonderful joy? — her cheeks were like 
her roses, her eyes had a brilliance like the 
sun ; the natural grace and mirth of the child 
blossomed in a thousand ways and gestures. 

As she went by the shrine in the wall, she 
bent her knee a moment and made the sign of 
the cross ; then she gathered a little moss-rose 
that nodded close under the border of the 
palisade, and turned and gave it to him. 


i 62 




“ Look, she sends you this. She is not 
angry, you see, and it is much more pleasure 
when she is pleased — do you not know?” 

He shrank a little as her fingers touched 
him. 

“ What a pity you had no mother, Bebee ! ” 
he said, on an impulse of emotion, of which in 
Paris he would have been more ashamed than 
of any guilt. 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 163 


CHAPTER XV. 

I N the deserted lane by the swans’ water, 
under the willows, the horses waited to take 
him to Mechlin ; little, quick, rough horses, 
with round brass bells, in the Flemish fashion, 
and gay harness, and a low char-a-banc, in 
which a wolf-skin and red rugs, and all a 
painter’s many necessities, were tossed together. 

He lifted her in, and the little horses flew 
fast through the green country, ringing chimes 
at each step, till they plunged into the deep 
glades of the woods of Cambre and Soignies. 
Bebee sat breathless with delight. 

She had never gone behind horses in all her 
life, except once or twice in a wagon when the 
tired teamsters had dragged a load of corn 
across the plains, or when the miller’s old gray 
mare had hobbled wearily before a cart-load 
of noisy, happy, mischievous children going 
home from the masses and fairs, and flags, 
and flowers, and church banners, and puppet- 
shows, and lighted altars, and whirling merry- 
go-rounds of the F^te Dieu. 

She had never known what it was to sail as 
on the wings of the wind along broad roads, 
with yellow wheat-lands, and green hedges, 


164 


bAb^e, 


and wayside trees, and little villages, and reedy 
canal water, all flying by her to the sing-song 
of the joyous bells. 

“ Oh, how good it is to live ! ” she cried, 
clapping her hands in a very ecstasy, as the 
clear morning broadened into gold and the 
west wind rose and blew from the sands by the 
sea. 

“Yes — it is good — if one did not tire so 
soon,” said he, watching her with a listless 
pleasure. 

But she did not hear; she was beyond the 
reach of any power to sadden her ; she was 
watching the white oxen that stood on the 
purple brow of the just reapen lands, and the 
rosy clouds that blew like a shower of apple- 
blossoms across the sky to the south. 

There was a sad darkling Calvary on the 
edge of the harvest- field that looked black 
against the blue sky ; its shadow fell across the 
road, but she did not see it: she was looking 
at the sun. 

There is not much change in the great 
Soignies woods. They are aisles on aisles of 
beautiful green trees, crossing and recrossing; 
tunnels of dark foliage that look endless ; long 
avenues of beech, of oak, of elm, or of fir, with 
the bracken and the brushwood growing dense 
between ; a delicious forest growth everywhere, 
shady even at noon, and by a little past mid- 
day dusky as evening ; with the forest fragrance, 
sweet and dewy, all about, and under the fern 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 165 

the stirring of wild game, and the white gleam 
of little rabbits, and the sound of the wings of 
birds. 

Soignies is not legend-haunted like the 
Black Forest, nor king-haunted like Fontaine- 
bleau, nor sovereign of two historic streams like 
the brave woods of Heidelberg ; nor wild and 



romantic, and broken with black rocks, and 
poetized by the shade of Jaques, and swept 
through by a perfect river, like its neighbors 
of Ardennes ; nor throned aloft on mighty 
mountains like the majestic oak glades of the 
Swabian hills of the ivory carvers. 

Soignies is only a Flemish forest in a plain, 
throwing its shadows over corn-fields and cattle 
pastures, with no panorama beyond it and no 


b^:b^:e, 


1 66 

wonders in its depth. But it is a fresh, bold, 
beautiful forest for all that. 

It has only green leaves to give, — - green 
leaves always, league after league ; but there is 
about it that vague mystery which all forests 
have, and this universe of leaves seems bound- 
less, and Pan might dwell in it, and St. Hubert, 
and John Keats. 

Bebee, in her rare holidays with the Bac 
children or with Jeannot’s sisters, had never 
penetrated farther than the glades of the Cam- 
bre, and had never entered the heart of the 
true forest, which is much still what it must 
have been in the old days when the burghers 
of Brabant cut their yew bows and their pike 
staves from it to use against the hosts of 
Spain. 

To Bebee it was as an enchanted land, and 
every play of light and shade, every hare 
speeding across the paths, every thrush singing 
in the leaves, every little dog-rose or harebell 
that blossomed in the thickets, was to her a 
treasure, a picture, a poem, a delight. 

He had seen girls thus in the woods of Vin- 
cennes and of Versailles in the student days of 
his youth ; little work-girls fresh from chalets 
of the Jura or from vine-hung huts of the Loire, 
who had brought their poor little charms to 
perish in Paris ; and who dwelt under the hot 
tiles and amidst the gilded shop signs till they 
were as pale and thin as their own starved 
balsams ; and who, when they saw the green 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 167 


woods, laughed and cried a little, and thought 
of the broad sun-swept fields, and wished that 
they were back again behind their drove of 
cows, or weeding among the green grapes. 

But those little work-girls had been mere 
homely daisies, and daisies already with the 
dust of the pavement and of the dancing- 
gardens upon them. 

Bebee was as pure and fresh as these dew- 
wet dog-roses that she found in the thickets of 
thorn. 

He had meant to treat her as he had used to 
do those work-girls — a little wine, a little woo- 
ing, a little folly and passion, idle as a butterfly 
and brief as a rainbow — one midsummer day 
and night — then a handful of gold, a caress, a 
good-morrow, and forgetfulness ever afterwards, 
— that was what he had meant when he had 
brought her out to the forest of Soignies. 

But — she was different, this child. 

He made the great sketch of her for his 
Gretchen, sitting on a moss-grown trunk, with 
marguerites in her hand : he sent for their 
breakfast far into the woods, and saw her set 
her pearly teeth into early peaches and costly 
sweetmeats ; he wandered with her hither and 
thither, and told her tales out of the poets and 
talked to her in the dreamy, cynical, poetical 
manner that was characteristic of him, being 
half artificial and half sorrowful, as his temper 
was. 

But Bebee, all unconscious, intoxicated with 


i68 


B&BiE, 


happiness, and yet touched by it into that 
vague sadness which the summer sun brings 
with it even to young things, if they have soul 
in them, — Bebee said to him what the work- 
girls of Paris never had done. 

Beautiful things : things fantastic, ignorant, 
absurd, very simple, very unreasonable often- 
times, but things beautiful always, and some- 
times even very wise by a wisdom not of the 
world ; by a certain light divine that does shine 
now and then as through an alabaster lamp, 
through minds that have no grossness to ob- 
scure them. 

Her words were not equal to the burden of 
lier thoughts at times, but he knew how to 
take the pearl of the thought from the broken 
shell and tangled sea-weed of her simple, un- 
tutored speech. 

“ If there be a God anywhere,” he thought 
to himself, “ this little Fleming is very near 
him.” 

She was so near that, although he had no 
belief in any God, he could not deal with her 
as he had used to do with the work-girls in the 
primrose paths of old Vincennes. 


OR TWO LITTLK WOODEN SHOES, 169 


CHAPTER XVI. 

“ ' I ''O be Gretchen, you must count the 
A leaves of your daisies,” he said to her, 
as he painted, — painted her just as she was, 
with her two little white feet in the wooden 
shoes, and the thick green leaves behind ; the 
simplest picture possible, the dress of gray — 
only cool dark gray — with white linen bodice, 
and no color anywhere except in the green 
of the foliage ; but where he meant the wonder 
and the charm of it to lie was in the upraised, 
serious, child-like face, and the gaze of the 
grave, smiling eyes. 

It was Gretchen, spinning, out in the open 
air among the flowers. Gretchen, with the tall 
dog-daisies growing up about her feet, among 
the thyme and the roses, before she had had 
need to gather one to ask her future of its 
parted leaves. 

The Gretchen of Scheffer tells no tale ; she 
is a fair-haired, hard-working, simple-minded 
peasant, with whom neither angels nor devils 
have anything to do, and whose eyes never can 
open to either hell or heaven. But the Gretchen 
of Flamen said much more than this : looking 
at it, men would sigh from shame, and women 
weep from sorrow. 


170 


bAb£E, 


“ Count the daisies? ” echoed Bebee. “Oh^ 
I know what you mean. A little — much — 
passionately — until death — not at all. What 
the girls say when they want to see if any one 
loves them? Is that it? ” 



She looked at him without any conscious- 
ness, except as she loved the flowers. 

“ Do you think the daisies know? ” she went 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 171 

-on, seriously, parting their petals with her 
fingers. “Flowers do know many things — 
that is certain.” 

“ Ask them for yourself.” 

“ Ask them what?” 

“ How much — any one — loves you ? ” 

“Oh, but every one loves me; there is no 
one that is bad. Antoine used to say to me, 
‘ Never think of yourself, Bebee ; always think 
of other people, so every one will love you.’ 
And I always try to do that, and every one 
does.” 

“ But that is not the love the daisy tells of 
to your sex.” 

“No?” 

“ No ; the girls that you see count the 
flowers — they are thinking, not of all the 
village, but of some one unlike all the rest, 
whose shadow falls across theirs in the moon- 
light ! You know that?” 

“Ah, yes — and they marry afterwards — 
yes.” 

She said it softly, musingly, with no embar- 
rassment ; it was an unreal, remote thing to 
her, and yet it stirred her heart a little with a 
vague trouble that was infinitely sweet. 

There is little talk of love in the lives of the 
poor ; they have no space for it ; love to them 
means more mouths to feed, more wooden 
shoes to buy, more hands to dive into the 
meagre bag of coppers. Now and then a girl 
of the commune had been married, and had 


72 


b^:bj^e, 


gone out just the same the next day to her 
ploughing in the fields or to her lace-weaving in 
the city. Bebee had thought little of it. 

“ They marry or they do not marry. That 
is as it may be,” said Flamen, with a smile. 
“ Bebee, I must paint you as Gretchen before 
she made a love-dial of the daisies. What is 
the story? Oh, I have told you stories enough. 
Gretchen’s you would not understand, just yet.” 

“ But what did the daisies say to her? ” 

“ My dear, the daisies always say the same 
thing, because daisies always tell the truth and 
know men. The daisies always say ‘ a little ’ ; 
it is the girl’s ear that tricks her, and makes 
her hear ‘ till death,’ — a folly and falsehood of 
which the daisy is not guilty.” 

“ But who says it if the daisy does not?” 

“ Ah, the devil perhaps — who knows? He 
has so much to do in these things.” 

But Bebee did not smile ; she had a look of 
horror in her blue eyes ; she belonged to a 
peasantry who believed in exorcising the fiend 
by the aid of the cross, and who not so very 
many generations before had driven him out of 
human bodies by rack and flame. 

She looked with a little wistful fear on the 
white, golden-eyed marguerites that lay on her 
lap. 

“ Do you think the fiend is in these? ” she 
whispered, with awe in her voice. 

Flamen smiled. “ When 3^ou count them he 
will be there, no doubt.” 


OR 7' WO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 17 j 

Bebee threw them with a shudder on the 
grass. 

“ Have I spoilt your holiday, dear? ” he said, 
with a certain self-reproach. 

She was silent a minute, then she gathered 
up the daisies again, and stroked them and put 
them to her lips. 

“ It is not they that do wrong. You say the 
girls’ ears deceive them. It is the girls who- 
want a lie and will not believe a truth because 
it humbles them; it is the girls that are to- 
blame, not the daisies. As for me, I will not 
ask the daisies anything ever, so the fiend will 
not enter into them.” 

“ Nor into you. Poor little Bebee ! ” 

“ Why, you pity me for that? ” 

“ Yes. Because, if women never see the 
serpent’s face, neither do they ever scent the 
smell of the paradise roses ; and it will be hard 
for you to die without a single rose d’amour in 
your pretty breast, poor little Bebee? ” 

“ I do not understand. But you frighten me 
a little.” 

He rose and left his easel and threw himself 
at her feet on the grass ; he took the little 
wooden shoes in his hands as reverently as he 
would have taken the broidered shoes of. a 
duchess; he looked up at her with tender, 
smiling eyes. 

“ Poor little Bebee ! ” he said again. “ Did 
I frighten you indeed? Nay, that was very 
base of me. We will not spoil our summer 


174 




holiday. There is no such thing as a fiend, 
my dear. There are only men — such as I am. 
Say the daisy spell over for me, Bebee. See if 
I do not love you a little, just as you love your 
flowers.” 

She smiled, and the happy laughter came 
again over her face. 

“ Oh, I am sure you care for me a little,” 
she said, softly, “or you would not be so good 



and get me books and give me pleasure ; and 
I do not want the daisies to tell me that, be- 
cause you say it yourself, which is better.” 

“ Much better,” he answered her dreamily, 
and lay there in the grass, holding the little 
wooden shoes in his hands. 

He was not in love with her. He was in no 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


175 


haste. He preferred to play with her softly, 
slowly, as one separates the leaves of a rose, 
to see the deep rose of its heart. 

Her own ignorance of what she felt had a 
charm for him. He liked to lift the veil from 
her eyes by gentle degrees, watching each new 
pulse-beat, each fresh instinct tremble into 
life. 

It was an old, old story to him ; he knew 
each chapter and verse to weariness, though 
there still was no other story that he still read 
as often. But to her it was so new. 

To him it was a long beaten track ; he knew 
every turn of it ; he recognized every wayside 
blossom ; he had passed over a thousand times 
each tremulous bridge ; he knew so well be- 
forehand where each shadow would fall, and 
where each fresh bud would blossom, and 
where each harvest would be reaped. 

But to her it was so new. 

She followed him as a blind child a man that 
guides her through a garden and reads her a 
wonder tale. 

He was good to her, that was all she knew. 
When he touched her ever so lightly she felt a 
happiness so perfect, and yet so unintelligible, 
that she could have wished to die in it. 

And in her humility and her ignorance she 
wondered always how he — so great, so wise, 
so beautiful — could have thought it ever worth 
his while to leave the paradise of Rubes’ land 
to wait with her under her little rush-thatched 


76 


bjs::Ae, 


roof, and bring her here to see the green leaves 
and the living things of the forest. 

As they went, a man was going under the 
trees with a load of wood upon his back, llebee 
gave a little cry of recognition. 

“Oh, look, that is Jeannot! How he will 
wonder to see me here ! ” 

Flamen drew her a little downward, so that 
the forester passed onward without perceiving 
them. 

“ Why do you do that? ” said Bebee. Shall 
I not speak to him?” 

“Why? To have all your neighbors chat- 
ter of your feast in the forest? It is not worth 
while.” 

“ Ah, but I always tell them everything,” 
said Bebee, whose imagination had been already 
busy with the wonders that she would unfold to 
Mere Krebs and the Varnhart children. 

“ Then you will see but little of me, my 
dear. Learn to be silent, Bebee. It is a 
woman’s first duty, though her hardest.” 

“ Is it? ” 

She did not speak for some time. She could 
not imagine a state of things in which she 
would not narrate the little daily miracles of 
her life to the good old garrulous women and 
the little open-mouthed romps. And yet — 
she lifted her eyes to his. 

“ I am glad you have told me that,” she 
said. “Though indeed, I do not see why one 
should not say what one does, yet — somehow 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


77 


— I do not like to talk about you. It is like 
the pictures in the galleries, and the music in 
the cathedral, and the great still evenings, 
when the fields are all silent, and it is as if 
Christ walked abroad in them ; I do not 
know how to talk of those things to the others 

— only to you — and I do not like to talk 
about you to them — do you not know? ” 

“ Yes, I know. But what affinity have I, 
Bebee, to your thoughts of your God walking 
in His cornfields? ” 

i- Bebee’s eyes glanced down through the 
green aisle of the forests, with the musing 
seriousness in them that was like the child- 
angels of Botticelli’s dreams. 

‘‘ I cannot tell you very well. But when I 
am in the fields at evening and think of Christ, 
I feel so happy, and of such good will to all 
the rest, and I seem to see heaven quite plain 
through the beautiful gray air where the stars 
are — and so I feel when I am with you — that 
is all. Only — ” 

“ Only what? ” 

“ Only in those evenings, when I was all 
alone, heaven seemed up there, where the stars 
are, and I longed for wings ; but now, it is 
here, and I would only shut my wings if I 
had them, and not stir.” 

He looked at her, and took her hands and 
kissed them — but reverently — as a believer 
may kiss a shrine. In that moment to Flamen 
she was sacred; in that moment he could no 


78 




more have hurt her with passion than he could 
have hurt her with a blow. 

It was an emotion with him, and did not 
endure. But whilst it lasted, it was true. 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES, 


79 


CHAPTER XVII. 

T hen he took her to dine at one of the 
wooden cafes under the trees. There 
was a little sheet of water in front of it and a 
gay garden around. There was a balcony and 
a wooden stairway ; there were long trellised 
arbors, and little white tables, and great rose- 
bushes like her own at home. They had an 
arbor all to themselves ; a cool sweet-smelling 
bower of green, with a glimpse of scarlet from 
the flowers of some twisting beans. 

They had a meal, the like of which she had 
never seen ; such a huge melon in the centre 
of it, and curious wines, and coffee or cream in 
silver pots, or what looked like silver to her — 
“just like the altar-vases in the church,” she 
said to herself. 

“ If only the Varnhart children were here ! ” 
she cried ; but he did not echo the wish. 

It was just sunset. There was a golden glow 
on the little bit of water. On the other side of 
the garden some one was playing a guitar. 
Under a lime-tree some girls were swinging, 
crying. Higher ! higher ! at each toss. 

In a longer avenue of trellised green, at a 
long table, there was a noisy party of students 


i8o 


bAbAe, 


and girls of the city ; their laughter was 
mellowed by distance as it came over the 
breadth of the garden, and they sang, with 
fresh shrill Flemish voices, songs from an opera 
boufife of La Monnaie. 

It was all pretty, and gay, and pleasant. 

There was everywhere about an air of light- 
hearted enjoyment. Bebee sat with a wonder- 



ing look in her wide-opened eyes, and all the 
natural instincts of her youth, that were like 
curled-up fruit buds in her, unclosed softly to 
the light of joy. 

“ Is life always like this in your Rubes’ 
land?” she asked him; that vague . far-away 
country of which she never asked him anything 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. i8i 

more definite, and which yet was so clear 
before her fancy. 

“ Yes,” he made answer to her. “Only — 
instead of those leaves, flowers and pome- 
granates ; and in lieu of that tinkling guitar, a 
voice whose notes are esteemed like king’s 
jewels ; and in place of those little green arbors, 
great white palaces, cool and still, with ilex 
woods and orange groves and sapphire seas 
beyond them. Would you like to come there, 
Bebee? — and wear laces such as you weave, 
and hear singing and laughter all night long, 
and never work any more in the mould of the 
garden, or spin any more at that tiresome 
wheel, or go any more out in the wind, and the 
rain, and the winter mud to the market? ” 

Bebee listened, leaning her round elbows on 
the table, and her warm cheeks on her hands, 
as a child gravely listens to a fairy story. But 
the sumptuous picture, and the sensuous phrase 
he had chosen, passed by her. 

It is of no use to tempt the little chafflnch of 
the woods with a ruby instead of a cherry. The 
bird is made to feed on the brown berries, on 
the morning dews, on the scarlet hips of roses, 
and the blossoms of the wind-tossed pear 
boughs ; the gem, though it be a monarch’s, 
will only strike hard and tasteless on its beak. 

“ I would like to see it all,” said Bebee, 
musingly trying to follow out her thoughts. 
“ But as for the garden work and the spinning 
— that I do not want to leave, because I have 


b^:b£e. 


182 

done it all my life; and I do not think I should 
care to wear lace — it would tear very soon ; 
one would be afraid to run ; and do you see I 
know how it is made — all that lace. I know 
how blind the eyes get over it, and how the 
hearts ache ; I know how the old women 
starve, and the little children cry ; I know that 
there is not a sprig of it that is not stitched 
with pain ; the great ladies do not think, I dare 
say, because they have never worked at it or 
watched the others ; but I have. And so, you 
see, I think if I wore it I should feel sad, and 
if a nail caught on it I should feel as if it were 
tearing the flesh of my friends. Perhaps I say 
it badly ; but that is what I feel.” 

“You do not say it badly — you speak well, 
for you speak from the heart,” he answered 
her, and felt a tinge of shame that he had 
tempted her with the gold and purple of a 
baser world than any that she knew. 

“ And yet you want to see new lands?” he 
pursued. “ What is it you want to see there? ” 

“ Ah, quite other things than these,” cried 
Bebee, still leaning her cheeks on her hands. 
“ That dancing and singing is very pretty and 
merry, but it is just as good when old Claude 
fiddles and the children skip. This wine, you 
tell me, is something very great; but fresh 
milk is much nicer, I think. It is. not these 
kind of things I want — I want to know all 
about the people who lived before us ; I want 
to know what the stars are, and what the wind 


OR TWO LITTLE WOOD ERF SHOES. 183 

is ; I want to know where the lark goes when 
you lose him out of sight against the sun ; I 
want to know how the old artists got to see 
God, that they could paint him and all his an- 
gels as they have done ; I want to know how 
the voices got into the bells, and how they can 
make one’s heart beat, hanging up there as 
they do, all alone among the jackdaws; I want 
to know what it is when I walk in the fields in 
the morning, and it is all gray and soft and still, 
and the corn-crake cries in the wheat, and the 
little mice run home to their holes, that makes 
me so glad and yet so sorrowful, as if I were so 
very near God, and yet so all alone, and such a 
little thing; because you see the mouse she 
has her hole, and the crake her own people, 
but I—” 

Her voice faltered a little and stopped : she 
had never before thought out into words her 
own loneliness ; from the long green arbor the 
voices of the girls and the students sang, — 

“ Ah ! le doux son d’un baiser tendre ! ” 

Flamen was silent. The poet in him — and 
in an artist there is always more or less of the 
poet — kept him back from ridicule, nay, 
moved him to pity and respect. 

They were absurdly simple words no doubt, 
had little wisdom in them, and were quite 
childish in their utterance, and yet they moved 
him curiously as a man very base and callous 
may at times be moved by the look in a dying 


184 


b£bAe, 


deer’s eyes, or by the sound of a song that 
some lost love once sang. 

He rose and drew her hands away, and took 
her small face between his own hands instead. 

“ Poor little Bebee I ” he said gently, looking 
down on her with a breath that was almost a 
sigh. “ Poor little Bebee ! — to envy the corn- 
crake and the mouse ! ” 

She was a little startled ; her cheeks grew 
very warm under his touch, but her eyes looked 
still into his without fear. 

He stooped and touched her forehead with 
his lips, gently and without passion,' almost 
reverently ; she grew rose-hued as the bright 
bean-flowers, up to the light gold ripples of 
her hair ; she trembled a little and drew back, 
but she was not alarmed nor yet ashamed ; she 
was too simple of heart to feel the fear that is 
born of passion and of consciousness. 

It was as Jeannot kissed his sister Marie, 
who was fifteen years old and sold milk for the 
Krebs people in the villages with a little green 
cart and a yellow dog — no more. 

And yet the sunny arbor leaves and the 
glimpse of the blue sky swam round her indis- 
tinctly, and the sounds of the guitar grew dull 
upon her ear and were lost as in a rushing hiss 
of water, because of the great sudden unin-- 
telligible happiness that seemed to bear her 
little life away on it as a sea wave bears a 
young child off its feet. 

“You do not feel alone now, Bebee?” he 
whispered to her. 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 185 

“ No ! ” she answered him softly under her 
breath, and sat still, while all her body quivered 
like a leaf. 

No ; how could she ever be alone now that 
this sweet, soft, unutterable touch would always 
be in memory upon her; how could she wish 
ever again now to be the corn-crake in the 
summer corn or the gray mouse in the hedge 
of hawthorn ? 

At that moment a student went by past the 
entrance of the arbor; he had a sash round 
his loins and a paper feather in his cap ; he 
was playing a fife and dancing; he glanced in 
as he went. 

“ It is time to go home, Bebee,” said Flamen. 


BABJ&Ey 


1 86 



CHAPTER XVIIL 


O it came to pass that Bebee’s 
day in the big forest came and 
went as simply almost as any 
day that she had played away 
with the Varnhart children under the beech 
shadows of Cambre woods. 

And when he took her to her hut at sunset 
before the pilgrims had returned there was a 
great bewildered tumult of happiness in her 
heart, but there was no memory with her that 
prevented her from looking at the shrine in the 
wall as she passed it, and saying with a quick 
gesture of the cross on brow and bosom, — 
“Ah, dear Holy Mother, how good you 
have been ! and I am back again, you see, and 
I will work harder than ever because of all this 
joy that you have given me.” 

And she took another moss-rose and changed 
it for that of the morning, which was faded^ 
and said to Flamen, — 

“Look — she sends you this. Now do you 
know what I mean? One is more content 
when She is content.” 

He did not answer, but he held her hands 
against him a moment as they fastened in the 
rose bud. 


OR TIVO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 187 


“Not a word to the pilgrims, Bebee — you 
remember? ” 

“Yes, I will remember. I do not tell them 
every time I pray — it will be like being silent 
about that — it will be no more wrong than 
that.” 

But there was a touch of anxiety in the 
words ; she was not quite certain ; she wanted 
to be reassured. Instinct moved her not to 
speak of him ; but habit made it seem wrong 
to her to have any secret from the people who 
had been about her from her birth. 

He did not reassure her; her anxiety was 
pretty to watch, and he left the trouble in her 
heart like a bee in the chalice of a lily. Be- 
sides, the little wicket gate was between them ; 
he was musing whether he would push it open 
once more. 

Her fate was in the balance, though she did 
not dream it : he had dealt with her tenderly, 
honestly, sacredly all that day — almost as 
much so as stupid Jeannot could have done. 
He had been touched by her trust in him, and 
by the unconscious beauty of her fancies, into 
a mood that was unlike all his life and habits. 
But after all, he said to himself — 

After all ! — 

Where he stood in the golden evening he 
saw the rosy curled mouth, the soft troubled 
eyes, the little brown hands that still tried to 
fasten the rosebud, the young peach-like skin 
where the wind stirred the bodice; — she was 


b^bAe, 


1 88 

only a little Flemish peasant, this poor little 
Bebee, a little thing of the fields and the 
streets, for all the dreams of God that abode 
with her. After all — soon or late — the end 
would be always the same. What matter ! 

She would weep a little to-morrow, and she 
would not kneel any more at the shrine in the 
garden wall ; and then — and then — she would 
stay here and marry the good boor Jeannot, 
just the same after a while ; or drift away after 
him to Paris, and leave her two little wooden 
shoes, and her visions of Christ in the fields at 
evening, behind her forevermore, and do as all 
the others did, and take not only silken stock- 
ings but the Cinderella slipper that is called 
Gold, which brings all other good things in its 
train ; — what matter I 

He had meant this from the first, because 
she was so pretty, and those little wooden sa- 
bots ran so lithely over the stones; though he 
was not in love with her, but only idly stretched' 
his hand for her as a child by instinct stretches 
to a fruit that hangs in the sun a little rosier 
and a little nearer than the rest. 

What matter — he said to himself — she 
loved him, poor little soul, though she did not 
know it; and there would always be Jeannot 
glad enough of a handful of bright French gold. 

He pushed the gate gently against her ; her 
hands fastened the rosebud and drew open the 
latch themselves. 

“Will you come in a little?” she said, with 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 189 

the happy light in her face. “ You must not 
stay long, because the flowers must be watered, 
and then there are Annemie’s patterns — they 
must be done or she will have no money and so 
no food — but if you would come in for a little ? 
And see, if you wait a minute I will show you 
the roses that I shall cut to-morrow the first 
thing, and take down to St. Guido to Our 
Lady’s altar in thank-offering for to-day. I 
should like you to choose them — you yourself 
— and if you would just touch them I should 
feel as if you gave them to her too. Will 
you ? ” 

She spoke with the pretty outspoken frank- 
ness of her habitual speech, just tempered and 
broken with the happy, timid hesitation, the 
curious sense at once of closer nearness and of 
greater distance, that had come on her since 
he had kissed her among the bright bean- 
flowers. 

He turned from her quickly. 

“ No, dear, no. Gather your roses alone, 
Bebee ; if I touch them their leaves will fall.” 

Then, with a hurriedly backward glance 
down the dusky lane to see that none were 
looking, he bent his head and kissed her again 
quickly and with a sort of shame, and swung 
the gate behind him and went away through 
the boughs and the shadows. 


190 


bAb&e, 


CHAPTER XIX. 

B EBEE looked after him wistfully till his 
figure was lost in the gloom. 

The village was very quiet ; a dog barking 
afar off and a cow lowing in the meadow were 
the only living things that made their presence 
heard ; the pilgrims had not returned. 

She leaned on the gate a few minutes in that 
indistinct, dreamy happiness which is the pre- 
rogative of innocent love; 

“ How wonderful it is that he should give a 
thought to me ! ” she said again and again to 
herself. It was as if a king had stooped for a 
little knot of daisied grass to set it in his crown 
where the great diamonds should be. 

She did not reason. She did not question. 
She did not look beyond that hour — such is 
the privilege of youth. 

“ How I will read ! How I will learn ! How 
wise I will try to be ; and how good, if I can ! ” 
she thought, swaying the little gate lightly 
under her weight, and looking with glad eyes at 
the goats as they frisked with their young in 
the pasture on the other side of the big trees, 
whilst one by one the stars came out, and an 
owl hooted from the palace woods, and the 
frogs croaked good-nights in the rushes. 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 19 1 

Then, like a little day laborer as she was, 
with the habit of toil and the need of the poor 
upon her from her birth up, she shut down the 
latch of the gate, kissed it where his hand had 
rested, and went to the well to draw its nightly 
draught for the dry garden. 

“ Oh, dear roses ! ” she said to them as she 
rained the silvery showers over their nodding 
heads. “Oh, dear roses! — tell me — was 
ever anybody so happy as I am? Oh, if you 
say ‘ yes ’ I shall tell you you lie ; silly flowers 
that were only born yesterday ! ” 

But the roses shook the water off them in 
the wind, and said, as she wished them to say, — 

“No — no one — ever before, Bebee — no 
one ever before.” 

For roses, like everything else upon earth, 
only speak what our own heart puts into them. 

An old man went past up the lane ; old 
Jehan, who was too ailing and aged to make 
one of the pilgrimage. He looked at the little 
quick-moving form, grayish white in the star- 
light, with the dark copper vessel balanced on 
her head, going to and fro betwixt the well and 
the garden. 

“You did not go to the pilgrimage, poor 
little one I ” he said across the sweetbrier 
hedge. “ Nay, that was too bad ; work, work, 
work — thy pretty back should not be bent 
double yet. You want a holiday, Bebee ; well, 
theF^te Dieu is near. Jeannot shall take you, 
and maybe I can find a few sous for ginger- 


192 




bread and merry-go-rounds. You sit dull in 
the market all day ; you want a feast.” 

Bebee colored behind the hedge, and ran in 
and brought three new-laid eggs that she had 
left in the flour-bin in the early morning, and 
thrust them on him through a break in the 
brier. It was the first time she had ever done 
anything of which she might not speak : she 
was ashamed, and yet the secret was so sweet 
to her. 

“ I am very happy, Jehan, thank God ! ” she 
murmured, with a tremulous breath and a shine 
in her eyes that the old man’s ears and sight 
were too dull to discern. 

“So was she’' muttered Jehan, as he thrust 
the eggs into his old patched blue blouse, — “ so 
was she. And then a stumble — a blow in the 
lane there — a horse’s kick — and all was over. 
All over, my pretty one — for ever and ever.” 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODED SHOES. 193 


CHAPTER XX. 

O N a sudden impulse Flamen, going through 
the woodland shadows to the city, paused 
and turned back; all his impulses were quick, 
and swayed him now hither, now thither, in 
many contrary ways. 

He knew that the hour was come — that he 
must leave her and spare her, as to himself he 
phrased it, or teach her the love words that the 
daisies whisper to women. 

And why not? — anyway she would marry 
Jeannot. 

He, half-way to the town, walked back again 
and paused a moment at the gate ; an emotion 
half pitiful, half cynical, stirred in him. 

Anyway he would leave her in a few days ; 
Paris had again opened her arms to him ; his 
old life awaited him ; women who claimed him 
by imperious, amorous demands reproached 
him ; and after all this day he had got the 
Gretchen of his ideal, a great picture for the 
future of his fame. 

As he would leave her anyway so soon, he 
would leave her unscathed — poor little field 
flower — he could never take it with him to 
blossom or wither in Paris. 


194 


bAb&e, 


His world would laugh too utterly if he made 
for himself a mistress out of a little Fleming in 
two wooden shoes. Besides — 

Besides, something that was half weak and 
half noble moved him not to lead this child, in 
her trust and her ignorance, into ways that 
when she awakened from her trance would 
seem to her shameful and full of sorrow. For 
he knew that Bebee was not as others are. 

He turned back and knocked at the hut 
door and opened it. 

Bebee was just beginning to undress herself; 
she had taken off her white kerchief and her 
wooden shoes ; her pretty shoulders and her 
little neck shone white in the moon ; her feet 
were bare on the mud floor. 

She started with a cry and threw the hand- 
kerchief again on her shoulders, but there was 
no fear of him ; only the unconscious instinct 
of her girlhood. 

He thought for a moment that he would not 
go away until the morrow — 

“Did you want me?” said Bebee softly, 
with happy eyes of surprise and yet a little 
startled, fearing some evil might have happened 
to him that he should have returned thus. 

“No; I do not want you, dear,” he said 
gently; no — he did not want her, poor little 
soul; she wanted him, but he — there were so 
many of these things in his life, and he liked 
her too well to love her. 

“ No, dear, I did not want you,” said Flamen, 


OR TWO IJTTLE WOODEN SHOES, 195 


drawing her arms about him, and feeling her 
flutter like a little bird, while the moonlight 
came in through the green leaves and fell in 
fanciful patterns on the floor. “ But I came to 
say — you have had one happy day, wholly 
happy, have you not, poor little Bebee? ” 

“ Ah, yes ! ” she sighed rather than said the 
answer in her wondrous gladness ; drawn there 
close to him, with the softness of his lips upon 
her. Could he have come back only to ask 
that? 

“ Well, that is something. You will remem- 
ber it always, Bebee?” he murmured in his 
unconscious cruelty. “ I did not wish to spoil 
your cloudless pleasure, dear — for you care 
for me a little, do you not? — so I came back 
to tell you only now that I go away for a little 
while to-morrow.” 

“ Go away ! ” 

She trembled in his arms and turned cold as 
ice ; a great terror and darkness fell upon her ; 
she had never thought that he would ever go 
away. He caressed her, and played with her 
as a boy may with a bird before he wrings its 
neck. 

“You will come back?” 

He kissed her: “Surely.” 

“ To-morrow? ” 

“ Nay — not so soon.” 

“ In a week? ” 

“ Hardly.” 

“ In a month, then? ” 


96 


bAb&e, 


“ Perhaps.” 

“ Before winter, anyway? ” 

He looked aside from the beseeching, tearful, 
candid eyes, and kissed her hair and her throat, 
and said, “ Yes, dear — beyond a doubt.” 

She clung to him, crying silently; he wished 
that women would not weep. 

“ Come, Bebee, listen,” he said coaxingly, 
thinking to break the bitterness to her. “ This 
is not wise, and it gives me pain. There is so 
much for you to do. You know so little. 
There is so much to learn. I will leave you 
many books, and you must grow quite learned 
in my absence. The Virgin is all very well in 
her way, but she cannot teach us much, poor 
lady. For her kingdom is called Ignorance. 
You must teach yourself. I leave you that to 
do. The days will go by quickly if you are 
laborious and patient. Do you love me, little 
one? ” 

For an answer she kissed his hand. 

“You are a busy little Bebee always,” he 
said, with his lips caressing her soft brown arms 
that were round his neck. “ But you must be 
busier than ever whilst I am gone. So you will 
forget. No, no, I do not mean that: — I mean 
so the time will pass quickest. And I shall 
finish your picture, Bebee, and all Paris will see 
you, and the great ladies will envy the little 
girl with her two wooden shoes. Ah ! that 
does not please you? — you care for none of 
these vanities. No. Poor little Bebee, why 


(9A* TWO LITTLE WOODED SHOES. 




did God make you, or Chance breathe life into 
you? You are so far away from us all. It 
was cruel. What harm has your poor little 
soul ever done that, pure as a flower, it should 
have been sent to the hell of this world ? ” 

She clung to him, sobbing without sound. 
“You will come back? You will come back?” 
she moaned, clasping him closer and closer. 

Flamen’s own eyes grew dim. But he 
lied to her : “ I will — I promise.” 

It was so much easier to say so, 
and it would break her sorrow. So 
he thought. 

For the moment again he was 
tempted to take her with him — but, 
he resisted it — he would tire, and 
she would cling to him forever. 

There was a long silence. The 
bleating of the little kid in the shed 
without was the only sound ; the gray 
lavender blew to and fro. 

Her arms were close about his 
throat; he kissed them again, and kissed her 
eyes, her cheek, her mouth ; then put her 
from him quickly and went out. 

She ran to him, and threw herself on the 
damp ground and held him there, and leaned 
her forehead on his feet. But though he 
looked at her with wet eyes, he did not yield, 
and he still said, — 

“I will come back soon — very soon; be 
quiet, dear, let me go.” 



98 


bAbAe, 


Then he kissed her once more many times, 
and put her gently within the door and closed 
it. 

A low, sharp, sudden cry reached him, went 
to his heart, but he did not turn ; he went on 
through the wet, green little garden, and the 
curling leaves, where he had found peace and 
had left desolation. 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


99 


CHAPTER XXL 

T WILL let her alone, and she will marry 

L Jeannot,” thought Flamen ; and he be- 
lieved himself a good man for once in his life, 
and pitied himself for having become a senti- 
mentalist. 

She would marry Jeannot, and bear many 
children, as those people always did ; and 
ruddy little peasants would cling about those 
pretty, soft, little breasts of hers ; and she 
would love them after the manner of such 
women, and be very content clattering over the 
stones in her wooden shoes ; and growing brown 
and stout, and more careful after money, and 
ceasing to dream of unknown things, and not 
seeing God at all in the fields, but looking low 
and beholding only the ears of the gleaning 
wheat and the feet of the tottering children ; 
and so gaining her bread, and losing her soul, 
and stooping nearer and nearer to earth till she 
dropped into it like one of her own wind-blown 
wall-flowers when the bee has sucked out all its 
sweetness and the heats have scorched up all its 
bloom: — yes, of course, she would marry 
Jeannot and end so ! 

Meanwhile he had his Gretchen, and that 
was the one great matter. 


200 




So he left the street of Mary of Burgundy, 
and went on his way out of the chiming city as 
its matin bells were rung, and took with him a 
certain regret, and the only innocent affection 
that had ever awakened in him ; and thought 
of his self-negation with half admiration and 
half derision ; and so drifted away into the 
whirlpool of his amorous, cynical, changeful, 
passionate, callous, many-colored life, and said 
to himself as he saw the last line of the low 
green plains shine against the sun, “ She 
will marry Jeannot — of course, she will marry 
Jeannot. And my Gretchen is greater than 
Scheffer’s/’ 

What else mattered very much, after all, 
except what they would say in Paris of 
Gretchen? 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


201 


CHAPTER XXIL 

P eople saw that Bebee had grown very 
quiet. But that was all they saw. 

Her little face was pale as she sat among 
Eer glowing autumn blossoms, by the side of 
the cobbler’s stall ; and when the Varnhart 
children cried at the gate to her to come and 
play, she would answer gently that she was too 
busy to have play-time now. 

The fruit girl of the Montague de la Cour 
hooted after her, ‘‘Gone so soon? — oh he! 
what did I say? — a fine pine is sugar in the 
teeth a second only, but the brown nuts you 
may crack all the seasons round. Well, did 
you make good harvest while it lasted? has 
Jeannot a fat bridal portion promised?” 

And old Jehan, who was the tenderest soul 
of them all in the lane by the swans’ water, 
would come and look at her wistfully as she 
worked among the flowers, and would say to 
her, — 

“ Dear little one, there is some trouble ; 
does it come of that painted picture? You 
never laugh now, Bebee, and that is bad. A 
girl’s laugh is pretty to hear ; my girl laughed 
like little bells ringing — and then it stopped, 


202 




all at once ; they said she was dead. But you 
are not dead, Bebee. And yet you are so 
silent ; one would say you were. 

But to the mocking of the fruit girl, as to the 
tenderness of old Jehan, Bebee answered noth- 
ing; the lines of her pretty curled mouth grew 
grave and sad, and in her eyes there was a wist- 
ful, bewildered, pathetic appeal like the look in 
the eyes of a beaten dog, which, while it aches 
with pain, does not cease 
to love its master. 

One resolve upheld 
her, and made her feet 
firm on the stones 
^ of the streets and 

, her lips mute 

!iv'" ^ 



under all they said 


to her. She would 
^ ^ — Jearn all she could, 

and be good, and patient, and wise, if trying 
could make her wise, and so do his will in all 
things — until he should come back. 

“ You are not gay, Bebee,” said Annemie, 
who grew so blind that she could scarce see the 
flags at the mastheads, and who still thought 
that she pricked the lace patterns and earned her 
bread. “You are not gay, dear. Has any lad 
gone to sea that your heart goes away with, and 
do you watch for his ship coming in with the 
coasters? It is weary work waiting; but it is 
all the men think us fit for, child. They may 
set sail as they like ; every new port has new 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


203 


faces for them ; but we are to sit still and to 
pray if we like, and never murmur, be the voy- 
age ever so long, but be ready with a smile and 
a kiss, a fresh pipe of tobacco, and a dry pair 
of socks; — that is a man.. We may have 
cried our hearts out ; we must have ready the 
pipe and the socks, or, ‘ Is that what you call 
love ? ’ they grumble. You want mortal patience 
if you love a man, — it is like a fretful child 
that thumps you when your breast is bare to it. 
Still, be you patient, dear, just as I am, just 
as I am.” 

And Bebee would shudder as she swept the 
cobwebs from the garret walls, — patient as she 
was, she who had sat here fifty years watch- 
ing for a dead man and for a wrecked ship. 



204 


bAb^:e, 


CHAPTER XXIII. 


T he wheat was reapen in the fields, and 
the brown earth turned afresh. The 
white and purple chrysanthemums bloomed 
against the flowerless rose-bushes, and the 
little gray Michaelmas daisy 
flourished where the dead 
carnations had spread their 
glories. Leaves began 
to fall and chilly winds 



to sigh among the willows ; the squirrels began 
to store away their nuts, and the poor to pick 
up the broken bare boughs. 

“ He said he would come before winter,’^ 
thought Bebee, every day when she rose and 
felt each morning cooler and grayer than the 
one before it ; winter was near. 

Her little feet already were cold in their 
wooden shoes ; and the robin already sang in 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 205 


the twigs of the sear sweetbrier ; but she had 
the brave sweet faith which nothing kills, and 
she did not doubt — oh ! no, she did not doubt, 
she was only tired. 

Tired of the strange, sleepless, feverish 
nights; tired of the long, dull, empty days; 
tired of watching down the barren, leafless lane ; 
tired of hearkening breathless to each step 
on the rustling dead leaves ; tired of looking 
always, always, always, into the ruddy autumn 
evenings and the cold autumn starlight, and 
never hearing what she listened for, never see- 
ing what she sought ; tired as a child may be 
lost in a wood, and wearily wearing its small 
strength and breaking its young heart in search 
of the track forever missed, of the home for- 
ever beyond the horizon. 

Still she did her work and kept her courage. 

She took her way into the town with her 
basket full of the ruby and amber of the dusky 
autumn blossoms, and when those failed, and 
the garden was quite desolate, except for a 
promise of haws and of holly, she went, as she 
had always done, to the lace-room, and gained 
her bread and the chickens’ corn each day by 
winding the thread round the bobbins; and at 
nightfall when she had plodded home through 
the darksome roads and over the sodden turf, 
and had lit her rushlight and sat down to her 
books, with her hand buried in her hair, and 
her eyes smarting from the strain of the lace- 
work, and her heart aching with that new and 


2o6 


b^:bAe, 


deadly pain which never left her now, she 
would read — read — read — read, and try and 
store her brain with knowledge, and try and 
grasp these vast new meanings of life that the 
books opened to her, and try and grow less 
ignorant against he should return. 

There was much she could not understand, 
but there was also much she could. 

Her mind was 
delicate and quick, 
her intelligence 
swift and strong; 
she bought old 
books at book- 
stalls with pence 
that she saved 
by going with- 
out her dinner. 
The keeper of 
the stall, a shrewd 
old soul, explained some 
hard points to her, and 
chose good volumes for 
her, and lent others to 
this solitary little student 
in her wooden shoes and with her pale child’s 
face. 

So she toiled hard and learned much, and 
grew taller and very thin, and got a look in her 
eyes like a lost dog’s, and yet never lost heart 
or wandered in the task that he had set her, or 
in her faith in his return. 






OR TWO LITTLE WO ODE. V SILOES. 


T.O'J 


“ Burn the books, Bebee,” whispered the 
children again and again, clinging to her skirts. 
“ Burn the wicked, silent things. Since you 
have had them you never sing, or romp, or 
laugh, and you look so white — so white.” 

Bebee kissed them, but kept to her books. 

Jeannot going by from the forest night after 
night saw the light twinkling in the hut window, 
and sometimes crept softly up and looked 
through the chinks of the wooden shutter, and 
saw her leaning over some big old volume with 
her pretty brows drawn together, and her 
mouth shut close in earnest effort, and he 
would curse the man who had changed her so», 
and go away with rage in his breast and tears 
in his eyes, not daring to say anything, but 
knowing that never would Bebee’s little brown 
hand lie in love within his own. 

Nor even in friendship, for he had rashly 
spoken rough words against the stranger from 
Rubes’ land, and Bebee ever since then had 
passed him by with a grave, simple greeting, 
and when he had brought her in timid gifts a 
barrow-load of fagots, had thanked him, but 
had bidden him take the wood home to his 
mother. 

“ You think evil things of me, Bebee? ” good 
Jeannot had pleaded, with a sob in his voice ; 
and she had answered gently, — 

“ No ; but do not speak to me, that is all.” 

Then he had cursed her absent lover, and 
Bebee gone within and closed her door. 


2o8 




She had no idea that the people thought ill 
of her. They were cold to her, and such cold- 
ness made her heart ache a little more. But 
the one great love in her possessed her so 
strongly that all other things were half unreal. 

She did her daily housework from sheer 
habit, and she studied because he had told her 
to do it, and because with the sweet, stubborn, 
credulous faith of her youth, she never doubted 
that he would return. 

Otherwise there was no perception of real 
life in her ; she dreamed and prayed, and prayed 
and dreamed, and never ceased to do either 
one or the other, even when she was scattering 
potato-peels to the fowls, or shaking carrots 
loose of the soil, or sweeping the snow from 
her hut door, or going out in the raw dark 
dawn as the single little sad bell of St. Guido 
tolled through the stillness for the first mass. 

For though even Father Francis looked 
angered at her because he thought she was 
stubborn, and hid some truth and some shame 
from him at confession, yet she went resolutely 
and oftener than ever to kneel in the dusty, 
dusky, crumbling old church, for it was all she 
could do for him who was absent — so she 
thought — and she did not feel quite so far 
away from him when she was beseeching 
Christ to have care of his soul and of his 
bo^dy. 

All her pretty dreams were dead. 

She never heard any story in the robins 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODE.V SILOES. 209 

song, or saw any promise in the sunset clouds, 
or fancied that angels came about her in the 
night — never now. 

The fields were gray and sad ; the birds were 
little brown things ; the stars were cold and 
far off ; the people she had used to care for 
were like mere shadows that went by her 
meaningless and without interest, and all she 
thought of was the one step that never came ; 
all she wanted was the one touch she never 
felt. 

You have done wrong, Bebee, and you will 
not own it,” said the few neighbors who ever 
spoke to her. 

Bebee looked at them with wistful, uncom- 
prehending eyes. 

“ I have done no wrong,” she said gently, 
but no one believed her. 

A girl did not shut herself up and wane pale 
and thin for nothing, so they reasoned. She 
might have sinned as she had liked if she had 
been sensible after it, and married Jeannot. 

But to fret mutely, and shut her lips, and 
seem as though she had done nothing, — that 
was guilt indeed. 

For her village, in its small way, thought as 
the big world thinks. 


210 


nAnfi ^ 


CHAPTER XXIV. 

F ull winter came. 

The snow was deep, and the winds drove 
the people with whips of ice along the dreary 
country roads and the steep streets of the city. 
The bslls of the dogs and the mules sounded 
sadly through the white misty silence of the 
Flemish plains, and the weary horses slipped 
and fell on the frozen ruts and on the jagged 
stones in the little frost-shut Flemish towns. 
Still the P'lemish folk were gay enough in many 
places. 

There were fairs and kermesses ; there were 
puppet plays and church feasts ; there were 
sledges on the plains and skates on the canals; 
there were warm woollen hoods and ruddy 
wood fires ; there were tales of demons and 
saints, and bowls of hot onion soup ; sugar 
images for the little children, and blessed beads 
for the maidens clasped on rosy throats with 
lovers’ kisses ; and» in the city itself there was 
the high tide of the winter pomp and mirth, 
with festal scenes in the churches, and balls at 
the palaces, and all manner of gay things in 
toys and jewels, and music playing cheerily 
under the leafless trees, and flashes of scarlet 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


2II 


cloth, and shining furs, and happy faces, and 
golden curls, in the carriages that climbed the 
Montagne de la Cour, and filled the big place 
around the statue of stout Godfrey. 

In the little village above St. Guido, Bebee’s 
neighbors were merry too, in their simple way. 

The women worked away wearily at their 
lace in the dim winter light, and made a 
wretched living by it, but all the same they got 
penny playthings for their babies, and a bit of 
cake for their Sunday hearth. They drew to- 
gether in homely and cordial friendship, and of 
an afternoon when dusk fell wove their lace in 
company in Mere Krebs’s mill-house kitchen, 
with the children and the dogs at their feet 
on the bricks, so that one big fire might serve 
for all, and all be lighted with one big rush 
candle, and all be beguiled by chit-chat and 
songs, stories of spirits, and whispers of ghosts, 
and now and then when the wind howled at its 
worst, a paternoster or two said in common 
for the men toiling in the barges or drifting 
up the Scheldt. 

In these gatherings Bebee’s face was missed, 
and the blithe soft sound of her voice, like a 
young thrush singing, was never heard. 

The people looked in, and saw her sitting 
over a great open book ; often her hearth had 
no fire. 

Then the children grew tired of asking her 
to play; and their elders began to shake their 
heads ; she was so pale and so quiet, there 


212 bAb^e, 

must be some evil in it — so they began to 
think. 

Little by little people dropped away from 
her. Who knew, the gossips said, what shame 
or sin the child might not have on her sick 
little soul? 



True, Bebee worked hard just the same, and 
just the same was seen trudging to and fro in 
the dusk of dawns and afternoons in her two 
little wooden shoes. She was gentle and 
laborious, and gave the children her goat’s 
milk, and the old women the brambles of her 
garden. 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


213 


But they grew afraid of her — afraid of that 
sad, changeless, far-away look in her eyes, and 
of the mute weariness that was on her — and, 
being perplexed, were sure, like all ignorant 
creatures, that what was secret must be also 
vile. 

So they hung aloof, and let her alone, and 
by and by scarcely nodded as they passed her, 
but said to Jeannot, — 

“You were spared a bad thing, lad; the 
child was that grand painter’s light-o’-love, 
that is plain to see. The mischief all comes of 
the stuff old Antoine filled her head with — a 
stray little by-blow of chickweed that he 
cockered up like a rare carnation. Oh ! do not 
fly in a rage, Jeannot; the child is no good, 
and would have made an honest man rue. 
Take heart of grace, and praise the saints, and 
marry Katto’s Lisa.” 

But Jeannot would never listen to the slan- 
derers, and would never look at Lisa, even 
though the door of the little hut was always 
closed against him ; and whenever he met 
Bebee on the highway she never seemed to see 
him more than she saw the snow that her 
sabots were treading. 

One night in the midwinter-time old Anne- 
mie died. 

Bebee found her in the twilight with her 
head against the garret window, and her left , 
side all shrivelled and useless. She had a little 
sense left, and a few fleeting breaths to draw. 


214 




“ Look for the brig,” she muttered. “ You 
will not see the flag at the masthead for the fog 
to-night ; but his socks are dry and his pipe is 
ready. Keep looking — keep looking — she 
will be in port to-night.” 

But her dead sailor never came into port; 
she went to him. The poor, weakened, faith- 
ful old body of her was laid in the graveyard of 
the poor, and the ships came and went under 
the empty garret window, and Bebee was all 
alone. » 

She had no more anything to work for, or 
any bond with the lives of others. She could 
live on the roots of her garden and the sale of 
her hens’ eggs, and she could change the 
turnips and carrots that grew in a little strip of 
her ground for the quantity of bread that she 
needed. 

So she gave herself up to the books, and 
drew herself more and more within from the 
outer world. She did not know that the neigh- 
bors thought very evil of her; she had only 
one idea in her mind — to be more worthy of 
him against he should return. 

The* winter passed away somehow, she did 
not know how. 

It was a long, cold, white blank of frozen 
silence; that was all. She studied hard, and 
had got a quaint, strange, deep, scattered knowl- 
edge out of her old books ; her face had lost 
all its roundness and color, but, instead, the 
forehead had gained breadth and the eyes had 
the dim fire of a student’s. 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES, 


215 


Every night when she shut her volumes she 
thought, — 

“ I am a little nearer him. I know a little 
more.” 

Just so every morning, when she bathed her 
hands in the chilly water, she thought to her- 
self, “ I will make my skin as soft as I can for 
him, that it may be like the ladies’ he has 
loved.” 

Love to be perfect must be a religion, as well 
as a passion. Bebee’s was so. Like George 
Herbert’s serving-maiden, she swept no specks 
of dirt away from a floor without doing it to 
the service of her lord. 

Only Bebee’s lord was a king of earth, made 
of earth’s dust and vanities. 

But what did she know of that? 


2I6 




CHAPTER XXV. 



HE winter went by, and the snow-drops and 


1 crocus and pale hepatica smiled at her 
from the black clods. Every other springtime 
Bebee had run with fleet feet under the budding 
trees down into the city, and had sold sweet 
little wet bunches of violets and brier before all 
the snow was melted from the eaves of the 
Broodhuis. 

“The winter is gone,” the townspeople used 
to say ; “ look, there is Bebee with the flowers.” 

But this year they did not see the little 
figure itself like a rosy crocus standing against 
the brown timbers of the Maison de Roi. 

Bebee had not heart to pluck a single blos- 
som of them all. She let them all live, and 
tended them so that the little garden should 
look its best and brightest to him when his 
hand should lift its latch. 

Only he was so long coming — so very long; 
the violets died away, and the first rosebuds 
came in their stead, and still Bebee looked 
every dawn and every nightfall vainly down the 
empty road. 

Nothing kills young creatures like the bitter- 
ness of waiting. 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES, 


217 


Pain they will bear, and privation they will 
pass through, fire and water and storm will not 
appall them, nor wrath of heaven and earth, but 
waiting — the long, tedious, sickly, friendless 
days, that drop one by one in their eternal 
sameness into the weary past, these kill slowly 
but surely, as the slow dropping of water frets 
away rock. 

The summer came. 

Nearly a year had gone by. Bebee worked 
■early and late. The garden bloomed like one 
big rose, and the neighbors shook their heads 
to see the flowers blossom and fall without 
bringing in a single coin. 

She herself spoke less seldom than ever ; and 
now when old Jehan, who never had understood 
the evil thoughts of his neighbors, asked her 
what ailed her that she looked so pale and 
never stirred down to the city, now her courage 
failed her, and the tears brimmed over her 
-eyes, and she could not call up a brave brief 
word to answer him. For the time was so 
long, and she was so tired. 

Still she never doubted that her lover would 
come back : he had said he would come : she 
was as sure that he would come as she was sure 
that God came in the midst of the people when 
the silver bell rang and the Host was borne by 
on high. 

Bebee did not heed much, but she vaguely 
felt the isolation she was left in : as a child too 
young to reason feels cold and feels hunger. 


2i8 


bAbAe, 


“ No one wants me here now that Annemie 
is gone,” she thought to herself, as the sweet 
green spring days unfolded themselves one by 
one like the buds of the brier-rose hedges. 

And now and then even the loyal little soul 
of her gave way, and sobbing on her lonely 
bed in the long dark nights, she would cry out 


against him, “ Oh, 
why not have left 
me alone? I was 
so happy — so 
happy ! ” 



And then she 
would reproach 
herself with trea- 
son to him and 
ingratitude, and 
hate herself and 
feel guilty in her 
own sight to have 
thus sinned against 


him in thought for one single instant. 

For there are natures in which the generosity^ 
of love is so strong that it feels its own just 
pain to be disloyalty; and Bebee’s was one of 
them. And if he had killed her she would 
have died hoping only that no moan had es- 
caped her under the blow that ever could 
accuse him. 

These natures, utterly innocent by force of 
self-accusation and self-abasement, suffer at 
once the torment of the victim and the criminak 



OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES, 219 


CHAPTER XXVI. 



,NE day in the May weather she sat within 


doors with a great book upon her table, 
but no sight for it in her aching eyes. The star- 
ling hopped to and fro on the sunny floor; the 
bees boomed in the porch ; the tinkle of sheep’s 
bells came in on the stillness. All was peaceful 
and happy except the little weary, breaking, 
desolate heart that beat in her like a caged 


bird’s. 


“He will come; I am sure he will come,” 
she said to herself; but she was so tired, and it 
was so long — oh, dear God ! — so very long. 

A hand tapped at the lattice. The shrill 
voice of Reine, the sabot-maker’s wife, broken 
with anguish, called through the hanging 
ivy,— 

“ Bebee, you are a wicked one, they say, but 
the only one there is at home in the village 
this day. Get you to town for the love of 
Heaven, and send Doctor Max hither, for my 
pet, my flower, my child lies dying, and not a 
soul near, and she black as a coal with chok- 
ing — go, go, go ! — and Mary will forgive you 
your sins. Save the little one, dear Bebee, do 
you hear? and I will pray God and speak fair 
the neighbors for you. Go ! ” 


220 


b£b£e, 


Bebee rose up, startled by the now unfamiliar 
sound of a human voice, and looked at the 
breathless mother with eyes of pitying wonder. 

“Surely I will go,” she said, gently ^ “but 
there is no need to bribe me. I have not 
sinned greatly — that I know.” 

Then she went out quickly and ran through 
the lanes and into the city for the sick child, 
and found the wise man, and sent him, and did 
the errand rather in a sort of sorrowful sympa- 
thetic instinct than in any reasoning conscious- 
ness of doing good. 

When she was moving through the once 
familiar and happy ways as the sun was setting 
on the golden fronts of the old houses, and the 
chimes were ringing from the many towers, a 
strange sense of unreality, of non-existence, fell 
upon her. 

Could it be she? — she indeed — who had 
gone there the year before the gladdest thing 
that the earth bore, with no care except to 
shelter her flowers from the wind, and keep 
the freshest blossoms for the burgomaster’s 
housewife? 

She did not think thus to herself; but a 
vague doubt that she could ever have been the 
little gay, laborious, happy Bebee, with troops 
of friends and endless joys for every day that 
dawned, came over her as she went by the 
black front of the Broodhuis. 

The strong voice of Lisa, the fruit girl, 
jarred on her as she passed the stall under its 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


221 


yellow awning that was flapping sullenly in the 
evening wind. 

“ Oh he, little fool,” the mocking voice cried, 
“the rind of the fine pine is full of prickles, 
and stings the lips when the taste is gone? — 
to be sure — crack common nuts like me, and 
you are never wanting — hazels grow free in 
every copse. Prut, tut ! your grand lover lies 
a-dying; so the students read out of this just 
now ; and you such a simpleton as not to get a 
roll of napoleons out of him before he went to 
rot in Paris. I dare say he was poor as spar- 
rows, if one knew the truth. He was only a 
painter after all.” 

Lisa tossed her as she spoke a torn sheet, 
in which she was wrapping gentians : it was a 
piece of newspaper some three weeks old, and 
in it there was a single line or so which said 
that the artist Flamen, whose Gretchen was the 
wonder of the Salon of the year, lay sick unto 
death in his rooms in Paris. 

Bebee stood and read ; the strong ruddy 
western light upon the type, the taunting 
laughter of the fruit girl on her ear. 

A bitter shriek rang from her that made even 
the cruelty of Lisa’s mirth stop in a sudden 
terror. 

She stood staring like a thing changed to 
stone down on the one name that to her filled 
all the universe. 

“ 111 — he is ill — do you hear ? ” she echoed 
piteously, looking at Lisa ; “ and you say he is 
poor?” 


222 




“ Poor? for sure! is he not a painter?” said 
the fruit girl, roughly. She judged by her 
own penniless student lads ; and she was an- 
gered with herself for feeling sorrow for this 
little silly thing that she had loved to torture. 

“ You have been bad and base to me ; but 
now — I bless you, I love you, I will pray for 
you,” said Bebee, in a swift broken breath, and 
with a look upon her face that startled into 
pain her callous enemy. 

Then without another word, she thrust the 
paper in her bosom, and ran out of the square 
breathless with haste and with a great resolve. 

He was ill — and he was poor I The brave 
little soul of her leaped at once to action. He 
was sick, and far away; and poor they said. 
All danger and all difficulty faded to nothing 
before the vision of his need. 

Bebee was only a little foundling who ran 
about in wooden shoes ; but she had the 
“dog’s soul” in her — the soul that will follow 
faithfully though to receive a curse, that will 
defend loyally though to meet a blow, and that 
will die mutely loving to the last. 

She went home, how she never knew; and 
without the delay of a moment packed up a 
change of linen, and fed the fowls and took the 
key of the hut down to old Jehan’s cabin. The 
old man was only half-witted by reason of his 
affliction for his dead daughter, but he was 
shrewd enough to understand what she wanted 
of him, and honest enough to do it. 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES 


223 


“ I am going into the city,” she said to him ; 
“ and if I am not back to-night, will you feed 
the starling and the hens, and water the flowers 
for me ? ” 

Old Jehan put his head out of his lattice; it 
was seven in the evening, and he was going to 
bed. 

“What are you after, little one? ” he asked; 
“ going to show the fine buckles at a students’ 
ball? Nay, fie; that is not like you.” 

“I am going to — pray — dear Jehan,” she 
answered, with a sob in her throat and the first 
falsehood she ever had told. “ Do what I ask 
you — do for your dead daughter’s sake — or 
the birds and the flowers will die of hunger and 
thirst. Take the key and promise me.” 

He took the key, and promised. 

“Do not let them see those buckles shine; 
they will rob you,” he added. 

Bebee ran from him fast; every moment that 
was lost was so precious and so terrible. To 
pause a second for fear’s sake never occurred 
to her. She went forth as fearlessly as a young 
swallow, born in northern April days, flies forth 
on instinct to new lands and over unknown seas 
when autumn falls. 

Necessity and action breathed new life into 
her. The hardy and brave peasant ways of her 
were awoke once more. She had been strong 
to wait silently with the young life in her dying 
out drop by drop in the heart-sickness of long 
delay. She was strong now to throw herself 


224 


b^bAe, 


into strange countries and dim perils and im- 
measurable miseries, on the sole chance that 
she might be of service to him. 

A few human souls here and there can love 
like dogs. Bebee’s was one. 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES, 


CHAPTER XXVII. 

I T was dark. The May days are short in 
the north lands of the Scheldt. 

She had her little winter cloak of frieze and 
her wooden shoes and her little white cap, with 
the sunny curls rippling out of it in their pretty 
rebellion. She had her little lantern too ; and 
her bundle , and she had put a few fresh eggs 
in her basket, with some sweet herbs and the 
palm-sheaf that Father Francis had blessed last 
Easter; for who could tell, she thought, how 
ill he might not be, or how poor? 

She hardly gave a look to the hut as she ran 
by its garden gate ; all her heart was on in 
front, in the vague far-off country where he lay 
sick unto death. 

She ran fast through the familiar lanes into 
the city. She was not very sure where Paris 
was, but she had the name clear and firm, and 
she knew that people were always coming and 
going thence and thither, so that she had no 
fear she should not find it. 

She went straight to the big, busy, bewilder- 
ing place in the Leopold quarter where the 
iron horses fumed every day and night along 
the iron ways. She had never been there be- 


226 


bAb£e, 


fore, but she knew it was by that great high- 
way that the traffic to Paris was carried on, 
and she knew that it would carry people also 
as well. 

There were bells clanging, lights flashing, 
and crowds pushing and shouting, as she ran 
up — a little gray figure, with the lantern-spark 
glimmering like any tiny glow-worm astray in a 
gas-lit city. 

“To Paris?” she asked, entreatingly, going 
where she saw others going, to a little grated 
wicket in a wall. 

“Twenty-seven francs — quick!” they de- 
manded of her. Bebee gave a great cry, and 
stood still, trembling and trying not to sob 
aloud. She had never thought of money ; she 
had forgotten that youth and strength and love 
and willing feet and piteous prayers, — all went 
for nothing as this world is made. 

A hope flashed on her and a glad thought. 
She loosed the silver buckles, and held them 
out. 

“Would you take these? They are worth 
much more.” 

There was a derisive laughter ; some one 
bade her with an oath begone ; rough shoulders 
jostled her away. She stretched her arms out 
piteously. 

“ Take me — oh, pray take me 1 I will go 
with the sheep, with the cattle— only, only 
take me I ” 

But in the rush and roar none heeded her; 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 227 


some thief snatched the silver buckles from her 
hand, and made off with them ^nd was lost in 
the throng; a great iron beast rushed by her, 
snorting flame and bellowing smoke; there was 
a roll like thunder, and all was dark; the night 
express had passed on its way to Paris. 

Bebee stood still, crushed for a moment with 
the noise and the cruelty and the sense of ab- 
solute desolation ; she scarcely noticed that the 
buckles had been stolen ; she had only one 
thought — to get to Paris. 

“Can I never go without money she 
asked at the wicket ; the man there glanced a 
moment, with a touch of pity, at the little wist- 
ful face. 

“The least is twenty francs — surely you 
must know that? he said, and shut his grating 
with a clang. 

Bebee turned away and went out of the great 
cruel, tumultuous place ; her heart ached and 
her brain was giddy, but the sturdy courage 
of her nature rose to need. 

“ There is no way at all to go without money 
to Paris, I suppose?” she asked of an old 
woman whom she knew a little, who sold nuts 
and little pictures of saints and wooden play- 
things under the trees, in the avenue hard by. 

The old woman shook her head. 

“Eh? — no, dear. There is nothing to be 
done anywhere in the world without money. 
Look, I cannot get a litre of nuts to sell unless 
I pay beforehand.” 


228 


b£b^:e, 


“ Would it be far to walk?” 

“Far! Holy Jesus ! It is right away in the 
heart of France — over two hundred miles, 
they say ; straight out through the forest. 
Not but what my son did walk it once — and 
he a shoemaker, who knows what walking 
costs; and he is well-to-do there now — not 
that he ever writes. When they want nothing 
people never write.” 

“ And he walked into Paris? ” 

“ Yes, ten years ago. He had nothing but a 
few sous and an ash stick, and he had a fancy 
to try his luck there. And after all our feet 
were given us to travel with. If you go there 
and you see him, tell him to send me some- 
thing — I am tired of selling nuts.” 

Bebee said nothing, but went on her road ; 
since there was no other way but to walk, she 
would take that way; the distance and the 
hardship did not appall two little feet that were 
used to traverse so many miles of sun-baked 
summer dust and of frozen winter mud un- 
blenchingly year after year. 

The time it would take made her heart sink 
indeed. He was ill. God knew what might 
happen. But neither the length of leagues nor 
the fatigue of body daunted her. She only saw 
his eyes dim with pain and his lips burned with 
fever. 

She would walk twenty miles a day, and then, 
perhaps, she might get lifts here and there on 
hay wagons or in pedlers’ carts ; people had 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


229 


always used to be kind to her. Anyhow she 
counted she might reach Paris well in fifteen 
days. 

She sat under a shrine in a by street a mo- 
ment, and counted the copper pieces she had 
on her; they were few, and the poor pretty 
buckles that she might have sold to get money 
were stolen. 

She had some twenty sous and a dozen eggs ; 
she thought she might live on that ; she had 
wanted to take the eggs to him, but after all, to 
keep life in her until she could reach Paris was 
the one great thing. 

“ What a blessing it is to have been born 
poor; and to have lived hardly — one wants so 
little ! ” she thought to herself. 

Then she put up the sous in the linen bosom 
of her gown, and trimmed her little lantern and 
knelt down in the quiet darkness and prayed a 
moment, with the hot agonized tears rolling 
down her face, and then rose and stepped out 
bravely in the cool of the night, on the great 
southwest road towards Paris. 

The thought never once crossed her to turn 
back, and go again into the shelter of her own 
little hut among the flowers. He was sick there, 
dying, for anything she knew; that was the 
only thing she remembered. 

It was a clear, starlit night, and everywhere 
the fragrance of the spring was borne in from 
the wide green plains, and the streams where 
the rushes were blowing. 


230 




She walked ten miles easily, the beautiful 
gray shadow all about her. She had never 
been so far from home in all her life, except to 
that one Kermesse at Mechlin. But she was 
not afraid. 

With the movement, and the air, and the 
sense that she was going to him, which made 
her happy even in her misery, 
something of the old, sweet, 
lost fancies came to her. 

She smiled at the stars 
through her tears, and as the 
poplars swayed and murmured 
in the wind, they looked to her 
like the wings and the swords 
of a host of angels. 

Her way lay out through 
the forest, and in that sweet 
green woodland she was not 
afraid — no more afraid than 
the fawns were. 

At Boitsfort she shrank 
^^^^a little, indeed. Here 
'i. there were the open-air 
restaurants, and the cafe 
gardens all alight for the pleasure-seekers 
from the city ; here there were music and 
laughter, and horses with brass bells, and 
bright colors on high in the wooden balconies, 
and below among the blossoming hawthorn 
hedges. She had to go through it all, and 
she shuddered a little as she ran, thinking of 



OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


231 


that one priceless, deathless forest day when he 
had kissed her first. 

But the pleasure-people were all busied with 
their mirth and mischief, and took no notice of 
the little gray figure in the starry night. She 
went on along the grassy roads, under the high 
arching trees, with the hoot of the owls and the 
cry of the rabbits on the stillness. 

At Groenendael, in the heart of the forest, 
midnight was striking as she entered the village. 
Every one was asleep. The lights were all out. 
The old ruined priory frowned dark under the 
clouds. 

She shivered a little again, and began to feel 
chill and tired, yet did not dare to knock at any 
one of the closed house doors — she had no 
money. 

So she walked on her first ten unknown miles, 
meeting a few people only, and being altogether 
unmolested — a small gray figure, trotting in two 
little wooden shoes. 

They thought her a peasant going to a fair 
or a lace mill, and no one did her more harm 
than to wish her good night in rough Flemish. 

When the dawn began to whiten above the 
plains of the east, she saw an empty cow-shed 
filled with hay; she was a little tired, and lay 
down and rested an hour or two, as a young 
lamb might have lain on the dried clover, for 
she knew that she must keep her strength and 
husband her power, or never reach across the 
dreary length of the foreign land to Paris. 


232 




But by full sunrise she was on her way again, 
bathing her face in a brook and buying a sou’s 
worth of bread and flet-milk at the first cottage 
that she passed in bright, leaf-bowered Hoey- 
laert. 

The forest was still all around her, with its 
exquisite life of bough and blossom, and mur- 
mur of insect and of bird. She told her beads, 
praying as she went, and was almost happy. 

God would not let him die. Oh, no, not till 
she had kissed him once more, and could die 
with him. 

The hares ran across the path, and the blue 
butterflies flew above-head. There was purple 
gloom of pine wood, and sparkling verdure of 
aspen and elm. There were distant church 
carillons ringing, and straight golden shafts 
of sunshine streaming. 

She was quite sure God would not let him 
die. 

She hoped that he might be very poor. At 
times he had talked as if he were, and then she 
might be of so much use. She knew how to 
deal with fever and suffering. She had sat up 
many a night with the children of the village. 
The gray sisters had taught her many of their 
ways of battling with disease ; and she could 
make fresh cool drinks, and she could brew 
beautiful remedies from simple herbs. There 
was so much that she might do ; her fancy 
played with it almost happily. And then, only 
to touch his hand, only to hear his voice; her 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


233 


heart rose at the thought, as a lark to its 
morning song. 

At Rixensart, buried in its greenery, as 
she went through it in morning light, some 
peasants greeted her cheerily, and called to 
her to rest in a house porch, and gave her 
honey and bread. She could not eat much ; 
her tongue was parched and her throat was 
dry, but the kindness was precious to her, and 
she went on her road the stronger for it. 

“ It is a long way to walk to Paris,” said the 
woman, with some curious wonder. Bebee 
smiled, though her eyes grew wet. 

“ She has the look of the little Gesu,” said 
the Rixensart people ; and they watched her 
away with a vague timid pity. 

So she went on through Ottignies and La 
Roche to Villers, and left the great woods and 
the city chimes behind her, and came through 
the green abbey valleys through Tilly and 
Ligny, and Fleurus, and so into the coal and 
iron fields that lie round Charleroi. 

Here her heart grew sick, and her courage 
sank under the noise and the haste, before the 
blackness and the hideousness. She had never 
seen anything like it. She thought it was hell, 
with the naked, swearing, fighting people, and 
the red fires leaping night and day. Neverthe- 
less, if hell it were, since it lay betwixt her and 
him, she found force to brave and cross it. 

The miners and glass-blowers and nail- 
makers, rough and fierce and hard, frightened 


234 


bAb^:e, 


her. The women did not look like women, 
and the children ran and yelled at her, and set 
their dogs upon her. The soil was thick with 
dust like soot, and the trees were seared and 
brown. There was no peace in the place, and 
no loveliness. Eighty thousand folks toiled 
together in the hopeless Tophet, and swarmed, 
and struggled, and labored, and multiplied, in 
joyless and endless wrestling against hunger 
and death. 


She got through it somehow, hiding often 
from the ferocious youngsters, and going sleep- 



less rather than lie in those dens of filth ; but 
she seemed so many, many years older when 
Charleroi lay at last behind her, — so many, 
many years older than when she had sat and 
spun in the garden at home. 

When she was once in the valley of the 
Sambre she was more herself again, only she 
felt weaker than she had ever done, because 
she only dared to spend one of her sous each 
day, and one sou got so little food. 



OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 235 


In the woods and fields about Alne she 
began to breathe again, like a bird loosed to the 
air after being shut in a wooden trap. Green 
corn, green boughs, green turf, mellow chimes 
of church bells, humming of golden bees, cradle 
songs of women spinning, homely odors of 
little herb gardens and of orchard trees under 
cottage walls, — these had been around her all 
her life ; she only breathed freely among them. 

She often felt tired, and her wooden shoes 
were wearing so thin that the hot dust of the 
road at noonday burnt her feet through them. 
Sometimes, too, she felt a curious brief faint- 
ness, such as she had never known, for the 
lack of food and the long fatigue began to tell 
even on her hardy little body. 

But she went on bravely, rarely doing less 
than her twenty miles a day, and sometimes 
more, walking often in the night to save time, 
and lying down in cow-sheds or under hay- 
stacks in the noontide. 

For the most part people were kind to her; 
they saw she was so very young and so poor. 

Women would give her leave to bathe her- 
self in their bedchambers, and children would 
ask her to wait on the village bench under the 
chestnut-tree, while they brought her their pet 
lamb or their tumbler pigeons to look at, but, 
for the most part — unless she was very, very 
tired — she would not wait. It took her so 
long, and who could tell how it fared with him 
in Paris? 


236 


bAbAe, 


Into the little churches, scattered over the 
wide countries between Charleroi and Erque- 
linnes, she would turn aside, indeed ; but, then, 
that was only to say a prayer for him; that 
was not loss to him, but gain. 

So she walked on until she reached the 
frontier of France. She began to get a little 
giddy ; she began to see the blue sky and the 
green level always swirling round her as if 
some one were spinning them to frighten her,, 
but still she would not be afraid ; she went on, 
and on, and on, till she set her last step on the 
soil of Flanders. 

Here a new, strange, terrible, incomprehen- 
sible obstacle opposed her : she had no papers ; 
they thrust her back and spoke to her as if she 
were a criminal. She could not understand 
what they could mean. She had never heard 
of these laws and rules. She vaguely compre- 
hended that she must not enter France, and 
stunned and heartbroken she dropped down 
under a tree, and for the first time sobbed as if 
her very life would weep itself away. 

She could see nothing, understand nothing. 
There were the same road, the same hedges, 
the same fields, the same white cottages, and 
peasants in blue shirts and dun-hued oxen in 
the wagons. She saw no mark, no difference, 
ere they told her where she stood was Belgium, 
and where they stood was France, and that 
she must not pass from one into the other. 

The men took no notice of her. They went 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


237 


back into their guard-house, and smoked and 
drank. A cat sunned herself under a scarlet 
bean. The white clouds sailed on before a 
southerly sky. She might die here — he there 
— and nothing seemed to care. 

After a while an old hawker ' came up; he 
was travelling with wooden clocks from the 
Black Forest. He stopped and looked at her, 
and asked her what she ailed. 

She knelt down at his feet in the dust. 

“ Oh, help me ! ” she cried to him. “ Oh, 
pray, help me ! I have walked all the way 
from Brussels — that is my country — and now 
they will not let me pass that house where the 
soldiers are. They say I have no papers. 
What papers should I have? I do not know. 
When one has done no harm, and does not owe 
a sou anywhere, and has walked all the way — 
Is it money that they want? I have none; and 
they stole my silver clasps in Brussels ; and if 
I do not get to Paris I must die — die without 
seeing him again — ever again, dear God ! ” 

She dropped her head upon the dust and 
crouched and sobbed there, her courage broken 
by this new barrier that she had never dreamed 
would come between herself and Paris. 

The old hawker looked at her thoughtfully. 
He had seen much of men and women, and, 
knew truth from counterfeit, and he was moved 
by the child’s agony. 

He stooped and whispered in her ear, — 

“ Get up quick, and I will pass you. It is 


bAbAe, 


238 

against the law, and I may go to prison for it. 
Never mind ; one must risk something in this 
world, or else be a cur. My daughter has 
stayed behind in Marbais sweethearting ; her 
name is on my passport, and her age and face 
will do for yours. Get up and follow me close, 
and I will get you through. Poor little soul ! 
Whatever your woe is it is real enough, and 
you are such a young and pretty thing. Get 
up, the guards are in their house, they have 
not seen ; follow me, and you must not speak 
a word ; they must take you for a German, 
dumb as wood.” 

She got up and obeyed him, not compre- 
hending, but only vaguely seeing that he was 
friendly to her, and would pass her over into 
France. 

The old man made a little comedy at the 
barrier, and scolded her as though she were 
his daughter for losing her way as she came to 
meet him, and then crying like a baby. 

The guards looked at her carelessly, joked 
the hawker on her pretty face, looked the 
papers over, and let her through, believing her 
the child of the clock-maker of the Hartz. 
Some lies are blessed as truth. 

“ I have done wrong in the law, but not be- 
fore God, I think, little one,” said the pedler. 
“Nay, do not thank me, or go on like that; 
we are in sight of the customs men still, and if 
they suspected, it would be the four walls of a 
cell only that you and I should see to-night. 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


239 


And now tell me your story, poor maiden : 
why are you on foot through a strange 
country?” 

But Bebee would not tell him her story ; she 
was confused and dazed still. She did not 
know rightly what had happened to her ; but 
she could not talk of herself, nor of why she 
travelled thus to Paris. 

The old hawker got cross at her silence, and 
called her an unthankful jade, and wished that 
he had left her to her fate, and parted com- 
pany with her at two cross-roads, saying his 
path did not lie with hers ; and then when he 



had done that, was sorry, and being a tender- 
hearted soul, hobbled back, and would fain 
press a five-franc piece on her ; and Bebee, re- 
fusing it all the while, kissed his old brown 
hands and blessed him, and broke away from 
him, and so went on again solitary towards St. 
Quentin. 

The country was very flat and poor, and yet 
the plains had a likeness in them to her own 
wide Brabant downs, where the tall green wheat 
was blowing and the barges dropping down the 
sluggish streams. 

She was very footsore; very weary; very 



240 


bAb^e, 


hungry SO often ; but she was in France — in 
his country ; and her spirit rose with the sense 
of that nearness to him. 

After all, God was so good to her; there 
were fine bright days and nights ; a few 
showers had fallen, but merely passing ones ; 
the air was so cool and so balmy that it served 
her almost as food ; and she seldom found 
people so unkind that they refused for her single 
little sou to give her a crust of bread and let 
her lie in an outhouse. 

After all, God was very good ; and by the 
sixteenth or seventeenth day she would be in 
the city of Paris. 

She was a little light-headed at times from 
insufficient nourishment; especially after wak- 
ing from strange dreams in unfamiliar places ; 
sometimes the soil felt tremulous under her, 
and the sky spun round ; but she struggled 
against the feeling, and kept a brave heart, and 
tried to be afraid of nothing. 

Sometimes at night she thought she saw old 
Annemie. “ But what if I do?” she said to 
herself; “ Annemie never will hurt me.” 

And now, as she grew nearer her goal, her 
natural buoyancy of spirit returned as it had 
never done to her since the evening that he had 
kissed and left her. As her body grew lighter 
and more exhausted, her fancy grew keener and 
more dominant. All things of the earth and 
air spoke to her as she went along as they had 
used to do. All that she had learned from the 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


241 


books in the long cold months came to her 
clear and wonderful. She was not so very ig- 
norant now — ignorant, indeed, beside him — 
but still knowing something that would make 
her able to read to him if he liked it, and to 
understand if he talked of grave things. 

She had no fixed thought of what she would 
be to him when she reached him. 

She fancied she would wait on him, and tend 
him, and make him well, and be caressed by 
him, and get all gracious pretty things of leaf 
and blossom about him, and kneel at his feet, 
and be quite happy if he only touched her now 
and then with his lips ; — her thoughts went no 
further than that; — her love for him was of 
that intensity and absorption in which nothing 
but itself is remembered. 

When a creature loves much, even when it 
is as little and as simple a soul as Bebee, the 
world and all its people and all its laws and 
ways are as naught. They cease to exist ; they 
are as though they had never been. 

Whoever recollects an outside world may 
play with passion, or may idle with sentiment, 
but does not love. 

She did not hear what the villagers said to 
her. She did not see the streets of the towns 
as she passed them. She kept herself clean 
always, and broke fast now and then by sheer 
instinct of habit, nothing more. She had no 
perception what she did, except of walking — 
walking — walking always, and seeing the white 
road go by like pale ribbons unrolled. 


242 


b£b£e, 


She got a dreamy, intense, sleepless light in 
her blue eyes that frightened some of those 
she passed. They thought she had been fever- 
stricken, and was not in her senses. 

So she went across the dreary lowlands, 
wearing out her little sabots, but not wearing 
out her patience and her courage. 

She was very dusty and jaded. Her woollen 
skirt was stained with weather and torn with 
briers. But she had managed always to wash 
her cap white in brook water, and she had 
managed always to keep her pretty bright curls 
soft ajid silken — for he had liked them so 
much, and he would soon draw them through 
his hand again. So she told herself a thousand 
times to give her strength when the mist would 
come over her sight, and the earth would seem 
to tremble as she went. On the fifteenth day 
from the night when she had left her hut by 
the swans’ water, Bebee saw Paris. 

Shining away in the sun ; white and gold ; 
among woods and gardens she saw Paris. 

She was so tired — oh, so tired — but she 
could not rest now. There were bells ringing 
always in her ears, and a heavy pain always in 
her head. But what of that? — she was so 
near to him. 

“Are you ill, you little thing?” a woman 
asked her who was gathering early cherries in 
the outskirts of the great city. 

Bebee looked at her and smiled : “ I do 

not know — I am happy.” 


OR TWO LITTLE WO ODE AT SHOES. 243 


And she went onward. 

It was evening. The sun had set. She had 
not eaten for twenty-four hours. But she 
could not pause for anything now. She crossed 
the gleaming river, and she heard the cathedral 
chimes. Paris in all its glory was about her, 
but she took no more note of it than a pigeon 
that flies through it intent on reaching home. 



No one looked at or stopped her; a little 
dusty peasant with a bundle on a stick over her 
shoulder. 

The click-clack of her wooden shoes on the 
hot pavements made none look up ; little rus- 
tics came up every day like this to make their 
fortunes in Paris. Some grew into golden 
painted silken flowers, the convolvuli of their 
brief summer days ; and some drifted into the 
Seine water, rusted, wind-tossed, fallen leaves, 


244 


bAb^e, 


that were wanted of no man. Anyhow it was 
so common to see them, pretty but homely 
things, with their noisy shoes and their little all 
in a bundle, that no one even looked once at 
Bebee. 

She was not bewildered. As she had gone 
through her own city, only thinking of the 
roses in her basket and of old Annemie in her 
garret, so she went through Paris, only thinking 
of him for whose sake she had come thither. 

Now that she was really in his home she was 
happy, — happy though her head ached with 
that dull odd pain, and all the sunny glare went 
round and round like a great gilded humming- 
top, such as the babies clapped their hands at, 
at the Kermesse. 

She was happy ; she felt sure now that God 
would not let him die till she got to him. She 
was quite glad that he had left her all that long, 
terrible winter, for she had learned so much 
and was so much more fitted to be with him. 

Weary as she was, and strange as the pain in 
her head made her feel, she was happy, very 
happy ; a warm flush came on her little pale 
cheeks as she thought how soon he would kiss 
them, her whole body thrilled with the old 
sweet nameless joy that she had sickened for in 
vain so long. 

Though she saw nothing else that was around 
her, she saw some little knots of moss-roses that 
a girl was selling on the quay, as she used to 
sell them in front of the Maison du Roi. She 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


had only two sous left, but she stopped and 
bought two little rosebuds to take to him. He 
had used to care for them so much in the sum- 
mer in Brabant. 

The girl who sold them told her the way to 
the street he lived in ; it was not very far off 
the quay. She seemed to float on air, to have 
wings like the swallows, to hear beautiful music 
all around. She felt for her beads, and said 
aves of praise. God was so good. 

It was quite night when she reached the 
street, and sought the number of his house. 
She spoke his name softly, and trembling very 
much with joy, not with any fear, but it seemed 
to her too sacred a thing ever to utter aloud. 

An old man looked out of a den by the door, 
and told her to go straight up the stairs to the 
third floor, and then turn to the right. The old 
man chuckled as he glanced after her, and lis- 
tened to the wooden shoes pattering wearily up 
the broad stone steps. 

Bebee climbed them — ten, twenty, thirty, 
forty. “ He must be very poor ! ” she thought, 
“to live so high”; and yet the place was wide 
and handsome, and had a look of riches. Her 
heart beat so fast, she felt suffocated; her limbs 
shook, her eyes had a red blood-like mist float- 
ing before them; but she thanked God each 
step she climbed ; a moment, and she would 
look upon the only face she loved. 

“ He will be glad; oh, I am sure he will be 
glad ! ” she said to herself, as a fear that had 


246 


bAbj^e, 


never before come near her touched her for a 
moment — if he should not care? 

But even then, what did it matter? Since 
he was ill she should be there to watch him 
night and day ; and when he was well again, if 
he should wish her to go away — one could al- 
ways die. 

“ But he will be glad — oh, I know he will be 
glad ! ” she said to the rosebuds that she carried 
to him. “ And if God will only let me save his 
life, what else do I want more? ” 

His name was written on a door before her. 
The handle of a bell hung down ; she pulled it 
timidly. The door unclosed ; she saw no one, 
and went through. There were low lights 
burning. There were heavy scents that were 
strange to her. There was a fantastic gloom 
from old armor, and old weapons, and old 
pictures in the dull rich chambers. The sound 
of her wooden shoes was lost in the softness 
and thickness of the carpets. 

It was not the home of a poor man. A 
great terror froze her heart, — if she were not 
wanted here? 

She went quickly through three rooms, see- 
ing no one, and at the end of the third there 
were folding doors. 

“It is I — Bebee,” she said softly, as she 
pushed them gently apart; and she held out 
the two moss-rosebuds. 

Then the words died on her lips, and a great 
horror froze her, still and silent, there. 


OR TWO LITTLE WO ODE AT SHOES. 247 

She saw the dusky room as in a dream. She 
saw him stretched on the bed, leaning on his 
elbow, laughing, and playing cards upon the 
lace coverlet. She saw women with loose shin- 
ing hair and bare limbs, and rubies and dia- 
monds glimmering red and white. She saw 
men lying about upon the couch, throwing dice 
and drinking and laughing one with another. 

Beyond all she saw against the pillows of his 
bed a beautiful brown wicked looking thing 
like some velvet snake, who leaned over him as 
he threw down the painted cards upon the 
lace, and who had cast about his throat her 
curved bare arm with the great coils of dead 
gold all a-glitter on it. 

And above it all there were odors of wines 
and flowers, clouds of smoke, shouts of laughter, 
music of shrill gay voices. 

She stood like a frozen creature and saw — 
the rosebuds in her hand. Then with a great 
piercing cry she let the little roses fall, and 
turned and fled. At the sound he looked up 
and saw her, and shook his beautiful brown 
harlot off him with an oath. 

But Bebee flew down through ihe empty 
chambers and the long stairway as a hare flies 
from the hounds ; her tired feet never paused, 
her aching limbs never slackened ; she ran on, 
and on, and on, into the lighted streets, into 
the fresh night air; on, and on, and on, straight 
to the river. 

From its brink some man’s strength caught 
and held her. She struggled with it. 


248 


bAbAe, 


Let me die ! let me die ! ” she shrieked to 
him, and strained from him to get at the cool 
gray silent water that waited for her there. 

Then she lost all consciousness, and saw the 
stars no more. 

When she came back to any sense of life, the 
stars were shining still, and the face of Jeannot 
was bending over her, wet with tears. 

He had followed her to Paris when they had 
missed her first, and had come straight by 
train to the city, making sure it was thither she 
had come, and there had sought her many 
days, watching for her by the house of Flamen. 

She shuddered away from him as he held 
her, and looked at him with blank, tearless 
•eyes. 

“ Do not touch me — take me home.” 

That was all she ever said to him. She 
never asked him or told him anything. She 
never noticed that it was strange that he should 
have been here upon the river-bank. He let 
her be, and took her silently in the cool night 
back by the iron ways to Brabant. 


OR TWO LITTLE WO ODE AT S/LOES. 249 



CHAPTER XXVIII. 


S HE sat quite still and upright in the wagon, 
with the dark lands rushing by her. 
She never spoke at all. ‘ She had a look that 
frightened him upon her face. When he tried 
to touch her hand, she shivered away from 


him. 


The charcoal-burner, hardy and strong 
among forest-reared men, cowered like a child 
in a corner, and covered his eyes and wept. 

So the night wore away. 

She had no perception of anything that 
happened to her until she was led through her 
own little garden in the early day, and her 
starling cried to her, “ Bonjour, Bonjour!” 
Even then she only looked about her in a be- 
wildered way, and never spoke. 

Were the sixteen days a dream? 

She did not know. 

The women whom Jeannot summoned, his 
mother and sisters, and Mere Krebs, and one 
or two others, weeping for what had been the 
hardness of their hearts against her, undressed 
her, and laid her down on her little bed, and 
opened the shutters to the radiance of the sun. 

She let them do as they liked, only she 


250 e , 

seemed neither to hear nor speak, and she 
never spoke. 

All that Jeannot could tell was that he had 
found her in Paris, and had saved her from the 
river. 

The women were sorrowful, and reproached 
themselves. Perhaps she had done wrong, but 
they had been harsh, and she was so young. 

The two little sabots with the holes worn 
through the soles touched them ; and they 
blamed themselves for having shut their hearts 
and their doors against her as they saw the 
fixed blue eyes, without any light in them, and 
the pretty mouth closed close against either 
sob or smile. 

After all she was Bebee — the little bright 
blithe thing that had danced with their chil- 
dren, and sung to their singing, and brought 
them always the first roses of the year. If she 
had been led astray, they should have been 
gentler with her. 

So they told themselves and each other. 

What had she seen in that terrible Paris to 
change her like this? — they could not telL 
She never spoke. 

The cock crowed gayly to the sun. The 
lamb bleated in the meadow. The bees boomed 
among the pear-tree blossoms. The gray lav- 
ender blew in the open house door. The greea 
leaves threw shifting shadows on the floor. 

All things were just the same as they had 
been the year before, when she had woke to 
the joy of being a girl of sixteen. 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 25 


But Bebee now lay quite still and silent on 
her little bed ; as quiet as the waxen Gesu that 
they laid in the manger at the Nativity. 

“ If she would only speak ! ” the women and 
the children wailed, weeping sorely. 

But she never spoke ; nor did she seem to 
hnow any one of them. Not even the starling, 
as he flew on her pillow and called her. 

“ Give her rest,” they all said ; and one by 
one moved away, being poor folk and hard 
working, and unable to lose a whole day. 

Mere Krebs stayed with her, and Jeannot 
sat in the porch where her little spinning-wheel 
stood, and rocked himself to and fro ; in vain 
agony, powerless. 

He had done all he could, and it was of no 
avail. 

Then people who had loved her, hearing, 
came up the green lanes from the city — the 
cobbler and the tinman, and the old woman 
who sold saints’ pictures by the Broodhuis. 
The Varnhart children hung about the garden 
wicket, frightened and sobbing. Old Jehan 
beat his knees with his hands, and said only 
over and over again, “ Another dead — another 
dead ! — the red mill and I see them all dead ! ” 

The long golden day drifted away, and the 
swans swayed to and fro, and the willows grew 
silver in the sunshine. 

Bebee, only, lay quite still and never spoke. 
The starling sat above her head; his wings 
drooped, and he was silent too. 


252 




herself and 


the 


Towards sunset Bebee raised 
called aloud : they ran to her. 

“Get me a rosebud — one with 
round it,” she said to them. 

They went out into the garden, and brought 
her one wet with dew. 

She kissed it, and laid it io one of her little 
wooden shoes that stood upon the bed. 

“Send them to him,” she said wearily; 
“ tell him I walked all the way.” 

Then her head drooped ; then momentary 
consciousness died out: the old dull lifeless 
look crept over her face again like 
the shadow of death. 

The starling spread his broad 
black wings above her head. 

She lay quite still once more. 

The women left the rosebud 
in the wooden shoe, not know- 
ing what she meant. 

Night fell. Mere Krebs 
watched beside her. Jean- 
not went down to the 
old church to beseech 
heaven with all his sim- 
ple, ignorant, tortured 
soul. The villagers hovered about, talking in 
low sad voices, and wondering, and dropping 
one by one into their homes. They were sorry, 
very sorry; but what could they do? 

It was quite night. The lights were put out 
in the lane. Jeannot, with Father Francis, 



OR TW9 LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 


■ 253- 


prayed before the shrine of the Seven Sorrows. 
Mere Krebs slumbered in her rush-bottomed 
chair; she was old and worked hard. The 
starling was awake. 

Bebee rose in her bed, and looked around,, 
as she had done when she had asked for the 
moss-rosebud. 

A sense of unutterable universal pain ached 
over all her body. 

She did not see her little home, its four white 
walls, its lattice shining in the moon, its wooden 
bowls' and plates, its oaken shelf and presses, 
its plain familiar things that once had been so 
dear, — she did not see them ; she only saw the 
brown woman with her arm about his throat. 

She sat up in her bed and slipped her feet 
on to the floor ; the pretty little rosy feet that 
he had used to want to clothe in silken stock- 
ings. 

Poor little feet! she felt a curious compassion 
for them ; they had served her so well, and 
they were so tired. 

She sat up a moment with that curious dull 
agony, aching everywhere in body and in brain. 
She kissed the rosebud once more and laid it 
gently down in the wooden shoe. She did not 
see anything that was around her. She felt a 
great dulness that closed in on her, a great 
weight that was like iron on her head. 

She thought she was in the strange, noisy, 
cruel city, with the river close to her, and all 
her dead dreams drifting down it like murdered 
children, whilst that woman kissed him. 


254 


jj£bAe, 


She slipped her feet on to the floor, and rose 
and stood upright. There was a door open to 
the moonlight — the door where she had sat 
spinning and singing in a thousand happy 
days; the lavender blew; the tall, unbudded 
green lilies swayed in the wind ; she looked at 
them, and knew none of them. 

The night air drifted through her linen dress, 
and played on her bare arms, and lifted the 
curls of her hair; the same air that had played 
with her so many times out of mind when she 
had been a little tottering thing that measured 
its height by the red rosebush. But it brought 
her no sense of where she was. 

All she saw was the woman who kissed him. 

There was the water beyond ; the kindly 
calm water, all green with the moss and the 
nests of the ouzels and the boughs of the hazels 
and willows, where the swans were asleep in the 
reeds, and the broad lilies spread wide and 
cool. 

But she did not see any memory in it. She 
thought it was the cruel gray river in the strange 
white city; and she cried to it; and went out 
into the old familiar ways, and knew none of 
them ; and ran feebly yet fleetly through the 
bushes and flowers, looking up once at the 
stars with a helpless broken blind look, like a 
thing that is dying. 

“ He does not want me ! ” she said to them ; 

he does not want me ! — other women kiss 
him there ! ” 


OR TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 255 

Then with a low fluttering sound like a bird’s 
when its wings are shot, and yet it tries to rise, 
she hovered a moment over the water, and 
stretched her arms out to it. 

“ He does not want me ! ” she murmured ; 
“ he does not want me — and I am so tired. 
Dear God ! ” 

Then she crept down, as a weary child creeps 
to its mother, and threw herself forward, and 
let the green dark waters take her where they 
had found her amidst the lilies, a little laugh- 
ing yearling thing. 

There she soon lay, quite quiet, with her 
face turned to the stars, and the starling poised 
above to watch her as she slept. 

She had been only Bebee : the ways of God 
and man had been too hard for her. 

When the messengers of Flamen came that 
day, they took him back a dead moss-rose and 
a pair of little wooden shoes worn through with 
walking. 

“ One creature loved me once,” he says to 
women who wonder why the wooden shoes are 
there. 



THE END. 


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